Software Engineer - Autonomous Air System V&V

Berlin, Germany; Munich, Germany

About the Position

Helsing is a defence AI company dedicated to protecting democracies. Our mission is to achieve technological leadership, ensuring open societies can make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. We are an ambitious team of engineers, AI specialists, and programme managers seeking mission-driven individuals to join our European teams and solve complex problems. We value an open and transparent culture that encourages healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and ethical implications.

Responsibilities

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues.
• Design and develop modules in simulation and validation frameworks, writing high-performance Rust code for simulators and test infrastructure.
• Build tools for automated test coverage, fault injection, and regression testing.
• Work closely with autonomy and systems teams to capture requirements and ensure simulation environments accurately represent real-world conditions.
• Debug and profile simulation performance, identifying bottlenecks and optimizing for speed, determinism, and fidelity.
• Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack.
• Mentor, find a mentee, and support the interviewing pipeline.
• Share experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers.
• Maintain our existing software stack, improving operational reliability and performance.
• Maintain documentation and testing infrastructure.
• Develop tests and benchmarks.
• Present work at weekly demo sessions.

Requirements

• Write modern, maintainable Rust.
• Experience in simulation, testing, robotics frameworks, or autonomous driving.
• Comfortable with complex systems and concurrency.
• Care about reliability, performance, and safety.
• Enjoy working on the interface between software and hardware.
• Motivated by fast feedback loops and real impact.
• 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.
• Comfortable working asynchronously.
• Strive to improve yourself, your peers, and the culture you work in over time.
• Feel that ethical considerations are an inherent part of engineering.

Nice to Have

• Aerospace or automotive background.
• Software/Hardware-in-the-loop or simulation experience.
• Experience building test rigs or ground-based integration systems.
• Knowledge of flight dynamics or control systems.
• Exposure to AI/ML systems testing.
• Container-based and cloud-native application architectures (e.g., Docker, Azure, AWS).
• Metrics tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Production ML systems.

We Offer

• Focus on outcomes, not time-tracking.
• Competitive compensation and VSOP options.
• Relocation support.
• Social and education allowances.
• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe.

About the Company

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields. Helsing’s work is important, directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing ethical and geopolitical concerns. We operate in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, 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 to the state of the art in technical innovation, and we are part of historic leaps forward in our field. We encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, focusing on outcomes, not conformity.

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.