AI Research Engineer - Computer Vision in London

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 involves delivering AI-based capabilities and the enabling foundation that allow machines to perceive and assist human decision-making. You will have the unique opportunity to shape AI capabilities in one of the most challenging sectors, where high generalisation capabilities need to be paired with hardware constraints and robustness against adversarial attacks. You will be part of a computer vision team responsible for building models for object detection, recognition, classification, and tracking. You will develop and extend state-of-the-art architectures and pipelines, design rigorous experiments, and conduct benchmarks to evaluate and improve real-world performance, including adaptation to the compute constraints and operational requirements of downstream deployments. You will collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams on high-impact projects.

Typical examples of day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Optimising models for real-time deployed performance on target hardware: selecting the best architecture or layers for throughput and latency constraints, curating and leveraging data to improve performance.
• Researching new model architectures, replicating and adapting SOTA detection, tracking, or classification methods to concrete use cases according to operational needs.
• Running multi-GPU or multi-node training jobs on large-scale sensor datasets to build powerful foundation or auto-annotation models.
• Interacting with product and downstream deployment teams to identify perception bottlenecks, prioritise improvements, and shape the roadmap for new capabilities.

You should apply if you:

• Hold an MSc in computer science, machine learning, robotics, or a closely related field, with experience in designing, implementing, and thoroughly evaluating advanced AI-based systems.
• Have hands-on experience developing and deploying computer vision models. You have iterated on models beyond benchmarks and understand what it takes to make visual perception reliable under real-world data distributions and deployment constraints.
• Are deeply familiar with modern deep learning architectures for visual perception, including convolutional and transformer-based models, and have applied techniques such as multi-task learning, domain adaptation, or model compression to practical problems.
• Possess solid software engineering skills, writing clean and well-structured code in Python, and have experience deploying AI software to production including testing, QA, and monitoring.
• Have excellent communication skills and the ability to report and present research findings clearly and efficiently, both internally and externally.
• Are passionate about keeping up to date with current research and enjoy reimplementing and extending state-of-the-art approaches in computer vision and deep learning.

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:

• PhD in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, or a related field, with publications in top-tier venues (e.g. CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, ICRA, IROS).
• Experience with object detection and classification, single and multi-object tracking, or scene understanding.
• Experience designing, evaluating, and delivering end-to-end AI systems on edge devices with constrained compute resources.
• Experience with simulators, emulators, or synthetic data generation pipelines.
• Experience with Rust and/or C++.

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:

• 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.

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.