Software Engineer - Backend (Berlin, Germany)

Software Engineer - Backend

Company Overview

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.

Job Summary

At Helsing we develop and deliver AI-based capabilities and the enabling infrastructure that allow semi-autonomous platforms to localise, navigate, and perceive the world in real time. We build software that is subject to significant and unorthodox technical constraints, must operate in a wide variety of constantly-changing environments, and has to support an ever-growing list of challenging use-cases. What we build ultimately ends up in the hands of real people in high-risk, high-stress situations, so must be both reliable and frictionless. Taken together, this brings a whole host of interesting engineering challenges across a wide variety of fields that you’ll help us solve. To give some examples: Distributed systems (e.g., intermittent connectivity and byzantine actors) Embedded computing (e.g., resource-constrained compute and reverse-engineering) Robotics (e.g., control systems and tasking) Networking (e.g., long-range low-bandwidth radios and cross-medium routing) Deployment infrastructure (e.g., air-gapped devices and heterogenous fleets) Security (e.g., data sharing in low-trust, no-TLS networks and actually-secret data handling) Machine learning (e.g., systems for model development, storage, and dissemination) In several of these areas, we are working near the state-of-the-art; we actively read (and sometimes implement) research papers, and often need to push even further to make theory work in practice. In others, we are applying well-known techniques to real-world situations (with real-world limitations) that have never been used in before, which requires skill, diligence, and honing a deep understanding of the underlying technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others takes precedence over spending more time on your own work.
• Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack. We encourage our engineers to look beyond their immediate team for missed opportunities, and to speak up when they identify one.
• Become a mentor, find a mentee, and help support and develop our interviewing pipeline. The people make or break the company, and we want as many engineers as possible to be part of fostering and growing the organisation.
• Share your experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers. We host tech talks, get together for smaller “let’s learn together” groups, run topical office hours (e.g., on Rust), etc. to help each other get better with time.
• Maintain our existing software stack, including working with internal and external customers to identify issues, improving operational reliability and performance, and fending off technical debt. The stack is a mix of Rust and Python, with Python mainly living in the ML-heavy sections.
• Further develop our tests and benchmarks, both at the micro and macro level. We operate in a domain where robustness is of the utmost importance, and an extensive and ever-improving test suite is key to achieving that. And without thorough benchmarks, we would be flying blind.
• Present your work at our weekly demo sessions. We want engineers to come together around what they are working on and to feel like they are not endlessly squirrelling away at something that doesn’t matter. To that end, we host (and actively work towards) demo sessions that allow early feedback, celebration of progress, and a better shared understanding of everything that goes on at Helsing.

Requirements / Qualifications

• Can 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.
• Are comfortable working asynchronously (writing PRs and RFCs, having discussions by email).
• Have backend development experience, ideally with a language like Rust, Java, Go, or C++.
• Are familiar with backend interface tools like REST, GraphQL, gRPC/Protocol Buffers, and Arrow.
• Strive to improve yourself, your peers, and the culture you work in over time.
• Feel like ethical considerations are an inherent part of engineering.

Preferred Qualifications

• Rust and Python specifically.
• Container-based and cloud-native application architectures (e.g., Docker, Azure, AWS).
• Metrics tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• SQL and streaming database systems.
• Routing protocols (e.g., IGP, BGP).
• Cryptographic protocols (e.g., Signal, WireGuard).
• Hardware interfaces (e.g., Arduino).
• Robotics (e.g., control systems).
• Production ML systems.

Location

Berlin, Berlin, Germany, Remote: False

Employment Type

Full Time

Salary & Benefits

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

Equal Opportunity Statement

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.