Data Engineer

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.

• Design and implement scalable data pipelines that ingest sensor and camera data, process large video datasets, and deliver AI-ready outputs with high throughput and reliability 

• Collaborate with field operations, AI researchers, and ML engineers to understand data requirements and translate them into automated, production-grade solutions

• Build the critical infrastructure layer between data acquisition in the field and model training in production, owning the architecture and technical decisions

• Reduce manual overhead through automation, establishing best practices for data quality, validation, and observability

• Design systems that work in constrained environments where standard tools and frameworks don't apply

• Have demonstrated experience architecting and scaling data infrastructure in production environments, including versioned storage systems with access control and efficient queryability

• Bring expertise in video processing pipelines, handling large media datasets efficiently, and optimizing for storage and compute constraints

• Write production-grade Python code with strong software engineering fundamentals

• Have worked with multi-sensor computer vision or robotics data, understanding the challenges of synchronization, calibration, and data acquisition in complex systems

• Communicate effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders, balancing speed with long-term architectural vision

Note: We operate at an intersection where women, as well as other minority groups, are systemically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

• Hands-on experience with hardware systems such as drones, multi-sensor robotics platforms, or custom data recording setups for computer vision

• Knowledge of video processing optimization and codec internals

• Background in defense, aerospace, or other hardware-intensive domains

• Experience with Rust for performance-critical components

• Helsing’s work is important. You’ll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns. 

• The work is unique. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world. 

• Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward. 

• In our domain, success is a matter of order-of-magnitude improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts.  

• We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about. 

• A focus on outcomes, not time-tracking

• Competitive compensation and stock options

• Relocation support

• Social and education allowances

• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe

• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled “Infraduction”), in which you will be building tooling and applications to be used across the company. This is your opportunity to learn our tech stack, explore the company, and learn how we get things done - all whilst working with other engineering teams from day one 

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.