Who we are

The role

At Helsing, we are redefining perception by building foundational intelligence for the physical world. You will research, design, and train large-scale Foundational Models that transform complex multimodal sensor data into cutting-edge autonomous capabilities.

We are seeking an individual at the intersection of AI Research and Machine Learning Engineering, with a proven track record in LLM/VLM/(multimodal) backbones. Your primary focus will be training and fine-tuning Vision-Language Models on our custom datasets to power our different products. You'll be responsible for the entire model lifecycle, from data curation and training to evaluation.

You should apply if you

• Hold an MSc or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Mathematics with a focus on Deep Learning.

• Possess theoretical understanding and practical experience in training Foundational Models (LLMs, VLMs, or other large-scale multimodal models) from scratch or through fine-tuning.

• Have strong software engineering skills in Python and fluency with modern DL frameworks (PyTorch/JAX). You don’t just import libraries; you are comfortable writing custom layers, loss functions, and distributed training loops.

• Are a clear communicator who can build from complex theoretical concepts and contribute to the company's internal research culture.

• Have a "first-principles" mindset: you enjoy reading the latest ArXiv papers and implementing them into the codebase rapidly.

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

• Top-Tier Research Track Record: You have authored publications in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL) specifically regarding attention mechanisms, efficient transformers, or multimodal learning.

• Experience training models on large-scale GPU clusters.

• Proven experience in data curation, data cleaning, data pruning, and building robust data pipelines for large-scale datasets.

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 “AI-duction”), in which you will be familiarising yourself with our tools and ML pipelines 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 AI and engineering teams from day one

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.