Software Engineer - Autonomous Air System V&V

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 programme 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 Our Autonomous Air System V&V team builds the simulation and validation environments that enable rigorous testing of autonomous air systems before they ever leave the ground. We develop Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) environments that allow engineers to integrate, test, and assure AI-driven capabilities against virtualised and representative hardware. 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 – from mission planning to command and control (C2) and mission debrief – so must be both reliable and frictionless. Taken together, this brings a whole host of interesting backend engineering challenges across a wide variety of fields that you'll help us solve. To give some examples: Simulation frameworks (e.g., high-fidelity SiL/HiL environments, real-time and deterministic simulation) Test automation (e.g., fault injection, automated test coverage, regression testing at scale) Hardware-software integration (e.g., testing against representative hardware, sensor and actuator interfaces) Real-time and high-performance computing (e.g., concurrency, low-latency execution, profiling and optimization) Distributed systems (e.g., orchestrating complex multi-component test environments) Deployment infrastructure (e.g., air-gapped devices and heterogeneous test rigs) Machine learning (e.g., systems for testing and validating AI/ML model behaviour) 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. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others takes precedence over spending more time on your own work. Design and develop modules in simulation and validation frameworks, writing high-performance Rust code for simulators and test infrastructure. Build tools for automated test coverage, fault injection, and regression testing to ensure comprehensive validation of autonomous systems. Work closely with autonomy and systems teams to capture requirements and ensure simulation environments accurately represent real-world conditions. Debug and profile simulation performance, identifying bottlenecks and optimizing for speed, determinism, and fidelity. Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack. 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 primarily Rust and Python. Maintain documentation and testing infrastructure, ensuring that our simulation environments are well-documented and accessible to other teams. Further develop our tests and benchmarks, both at the micro and macro level. We operate in a domain where robustness is of the utmost importance, and an extensive and eve