Software Engineer - Airborne Mission Systems

Who we are Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously. We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing program managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications. The role Imagine building the vital infrastructure for a cutting-edge autonomous aerial platform that will actually take flight. At Helsing, you won't just be developing software; you'll be shaping the foundational capabilities for our own Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), the CA-1 Europa. This is a unique opportunity to directly contribute to a novel system designed from the ground up. You will be building the higher-level mission control foundation, the sophisticated infrastructure that enables real-time sensor processing, secure communication, seamless integration of autonomous decision-making modules, and reliable interfacing with lower-level flight control systems. This isn't theoretical; your code will be critical to the CA-1 Europa's ability to fly, perceive, and operate effectively in the most demanding environments. We build software that is subject to significant and unorthodox technical constraints, must operate in a wide variety of constantly-changing environments, and has to support an ever-growing list of challenging use-cases. What we build ultimately ends up in the hands of real people in high-risk, high-stress situations, so it must be both reliable and frictionless. Taken together, this brings a whole host of interesting engineering challenges across a wide variety of fields that you’ll help us solve. To give some examples: Distributed systems & Communications (e.g., intermittent connectivity and integrating with bespoke communication hardware and protocols) Embedded computing (e.g., resource-constrained compute and real-time operating systems) Networking (e.g., long-range low-bandwidth radios and cross-medium routing) Deployment & Integration Infrastructure (e.g., designing and implementing custom secure runtime environments for vendor code) In several of these areas, we are working near the state-of-the-art; we actively read (and sometimes implement) research papers, and often need to push even further to make theory work in practice. In others, we are applying well-known techniques to real-world situations (with real-world limitations) that have never been used in before, which requires skill, diligence, and honing a deep understanding of the underlying technologies. The day-to-day Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues, ensuring robustness and adherence to safety and performance standards critical for airborne applications. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others takes precedence over spending more time on your own work. Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack, with a focus on refining the capabilities and reliability of our airborne mission systems. We encourage our engineers to look beyond their immediate team for missed opportunities, and to speak up when they identify one. Become a mentor, find a mentee, and help support and develop our interviewing pipeline. The people make or break the company, and we want as many engineers as possible to be part of fostering and growing the organisation. Share your experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers. We host tech talks, get together for smaller “let’s learn together” groups, run topical office hours (e.g., on Rust), etc. to help each other get better with time. Maintain our existing software stack, including working with internal and external customers to identify issues, improving operational reliability and performance, and fending off technical debt. The stack is a mix of Rust and Python, with Python mainly living in the ML-heavy sections. Further develop our tests and benchmarks, both at the micro and macro level, including hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations and flight testing. We operate in a domain where robustness is of the utmost importance, and an extensive and ever-improving test suite is key to achieving that. And without thorough benchmarks, we would be flying blind. Present your work at our weekly demo sessions. We want engineers to come together around what they are working on and to feel like they are not endlessly squirre