Software Engineer - Autonomous Air 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 You’ll build the autonomy brain for a cutting-edge autonomous aerial platform that will actually take flight. At Helsing, you won't just be developing software; you'll be integrating state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agents into the operational systems of our own Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), the CA-1 Europa, part of the groundbreaking Centaur project. This is a unique opportunity to directly contribute to a novel autonomous system designed from the ground up. Working at the intersection of machine learning and systems engineering, you'll integrate reinforcement learning agents into high-performance runtime systems, enabling real-time autonomous decision-making in flight. This isn't theoretical; your code will enable the CA-1 Europa to perceive, reason, and act autonomously in the most demanding environments. 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. To give some examples: Autonomous Decision-Making Systems — reliable pipelines from sensor data to RL inference to tactical execution, including edge-case and failure-mode handling. Reinforcement Learning Integration — bridging Python-based RL agents with Rust runtime systems for low-latency, reproducible inference. Distributed Systems & Communications — handling intermittent connectivity and bespoke hardware protocols. Training Infrastructure — distributed training, evaluation pipelines, and large-scale runs on custom simulators. In some areas, we're working at the state-of-the-art—actively implementing research papers and pushing further. In others, we're applying proven techniques to real-world situations they've never encountered before. Both require skill, diligence, and deep technical understanding. Our software operates under significant constraints, in constantly-changing environments, for users in high-risk situations. It must be reliable and frictionless. That's what makes this work hard—and worth doing. The day-to-day 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. 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. You should apply if you Can write legible, maintainable, and performant code. Communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing. Enjoy collaborating with others, including reviewing code and pair programming, particularly on complex system architectures involving tight hardware-software integration on a real-world aerial platform.