AI Research Engineer - Foundation Models 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.

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:

• 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).
• 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 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. 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.