AI Research Engineer - ML & Signal Processing

Who we are

Helsing is a defence AI company with the mission is to protect our liberal democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. We believe we have a responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI and take this responsibility seriously.

We are an ambitious and committed team of software and deployment 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 today.

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

At Helsing you will work at the intersection of machine learning and signal processing on RF data, helping build the AI capabilities inside our electronic warfare systems: models that detect, classify, and reason about RF signals in congested, contested spectrum. The data is messy, irregular, and adversarial. Output runs on real platforms, under hard latency and compute budgets. What you build has to survive contact with the deployment target.

You will own problems end-to-end: read the literature, prototype on real recorded data, push to the edge, watch it run. You will work in a small research team alongside RF and hardware engineers and the operators using the system.

Current focus areas include self-supervised representation learning on signal data, deinterleaving and emitter identification, mode recognition, and anomaly detection on embedded hardware.

You should apply if you

• Hold a PhD (or have an equivalent research track record) in ML, signal processing, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field, with publications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ICASSP, or similar venues.

• Have shipped non-trivial ML into a real product - not just notebooks. You know what breaks between research and deployment.

• Are comfortable on irregular, noisy sequence data: temporal models, self-supervised or contrastive methods, calibration under distribution shift.

• Write clean Python, and are willing to pick up Rust where the deployment target demands it.

• Read papers and reimplement them. You can tell which results will hold up and which won't.

• Communicate research clearly to ML peers, RF engineers, and end users.

We don't expect you to arrive with deep RF expertise. A strong ML or physics background and willingness to learn the domain alongside RF colleagues is enough.

Note: We operate at an intersection where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically 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.

Nice to have

• Experience with EW, SIGINT, ESM/ELINT, RWR, or radar concepts.

• Familiarity with RF signal theory at a level sufficient to talk to RF engineers (modulation, propagation, antenna patterns — see modulation-schemes).

• Experience deploying ML to edge or embedded hardware (ONNX, TensorRT, quantisation, profiling on constrained GPUs).

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields

• 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

What we offer

• Competitive salary and VSOP options

• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation

• Learning: €500/£450 yearly allowance

• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health)

• Social: regular company events and monthly social allowances

• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers

• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work

These are the core benefits across all locations, there may be additional benefits in certain locations.

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.

Helsing's Candidate Privacy and Confidentiality Regime can be found here.