AI Research Engineer - ML & Signal Processing
Primary stack
Job description
About the Position
AI Research Engineer - ML & Signal Processing
Berlin; Munich
About the Company
Helsing is a defence AI company with the mission 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.
Responsibilities
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.
Requirements
- 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).
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.
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