About the Position

Lead IT Engineer

Munich - Berlin - London

About the Company

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

We are looking for a Lead IT Engineer to set the technical direction of Helsing's corporate IT. You will own the architecture across identity, endpoints, networking, and cloud. You will also build the foundations, pipelines, and engineering practices that let the team make changes safely, repeatably, and with a full audit trail. You will still get hands-on when a problem calls for it, but most of your impact will come from design, technical decisions, and raising the engineering bar across the IT team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. Helsing is growing fast across new offices, production sites, and customer environments, many of them with strict security and regulatory requirements. The systems you design will support the engineers and AI specialists building capabilities that protect democracies.

Responsibilities

Own the technical architecture of our corporate IT estate and set the standards the team builds
Design and build IT tooling, including reusable Terraform modules, remote state, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and end-to-end testing
Scope, plan, and lead major IT projects from concept to delivery, such as new office and production site builds, identity and device management changes, and cloud-hosted, segmented, or air-gapped environments
Act as the senior technical escalation point for IT Support and IT Engineering, and step in hands-on on the hardest problems
Mentor engineers formally and informally, helping the team build the skills to work confidently in a code-first way

Requirements

Significant experience in IT engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps, including time as the technical lead or architect for a corporate IT or cloud estate
Comfortable with DevOps practices such as Git workflows, pipelines, code review, and secrets management, and want to bring them into an IT team
Deep expertise in Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, including Conditional Access, SSO, and identity lifecycle
Experience managing macOS and Windows fleets with Jamf and Intune
Understand enterprise networking and Zero Trust access
Lead through technical credibility, explain trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to Have

Experience managing SaaS platforms through Terraform, such as Entra ID, Jamf, Okta, or Meraki
Experience with policy as code or automated compliance checks
Experience in regulated or classified environments, such as BSI IT-Grundschutz, VS-NfD, ISO 27001, CE+, or NIS2
AWS experience, particularly IAM, Organizations, IAM Identity Center, and networking
Linux server administration and virtualization with Proxmox, VMware, or Hyper-V, including on-prem and air-gapped datacenter builds
Infrastructure and networking experience in Azure
Experience with security tooling such as Microsoft Defender, Purview, and vulnerability management platforms like Tenable

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
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 (Specifically for engineering and AI)

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.

Lead IT Engineer

Job description