The role

Collaborating closely with our dynamic team of product designers and engineers, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the foundation of frontend at Helsing. Embracing a hands-on approach, you'll not only lead by example, but also spearhead the development and expansion of a tight-knit team that works across a wide-range of internal teams and products. Your primary emphasis will be on enhancing usability, creating re-usable foundations for multiple front-ends and optimising the end-user experience across the entire company.

The day-to-day

• Own the user interface end-to-end (from scribble to production-ready code)

• Create and manage our visual design together with our UX and product management team

• Establish and curate our component library and ensure its compliance with our needs (visual design, reusability, etc)

• Create and maintain build and deployment pipelines

• Continually optimise our user experience for performance

• Connect with, understand and make small changes to potentially multiple unfamiliar backends

• Build re-usable tooling that benchmarks, instruments and identifies performance problems deep in the front-end stack

You should apply if you

• Have very strong Frontend design and coding experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML and CSS.

• Have state of the art experience with frameworks/SDKs in frontend like React.

• Are experienced with APIs and other server-client communication like REST and GraphQL.

• Have solid front-end architecture and software design ability.

• Are experienced with Component Libraries like Material UI, and know how they can be used by non-traditional front-end engineers to build MVPs quickly.

• Have opinions and experiences about building things right and feel comfortable challenging how we can improve and evolve.

• Have a strong understanding of build, deployment and dependency management systems like npm, pnpm and yarn.

• Have experience with running software live in production.

• Are passionate about development and staying on top of current techniques.

• Are able to write clear, maintainable, portable code that adheres to a well-documented coding standard

Note: The above bullet points describe the ideal candidate. None of us matched all of these at once when we first joined Helsing.

You should apply if you

• Significant recent experience with React.

• Working knowledge of Next.js/SSR and its strengths and weaknesses.

• Established understanding of one-or-more modern JS bundlers, such as Vite.

• Experience with styling utility-class libraries such as TailwindCSS.

• Previous exposure to other programming languages like Python or Rust.

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

• 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