Software Engineer - Frontend 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 collaborating closely with our dynamic team of product designers and engineers, playing a pivotal role in shaping the foundation of frontend at Helsing. Embracing a hands‐on approach, you will lead by example and 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 reusable foundations for multiple front‐ends and optimising the end‐user experience across the entire company.

The day‐to‐day responsibilities include:

• Reviewing code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues.
• Owning the user interface end‐to‐end, from early wireframes and prototypes through to performant, production‐ready code.
• Proposing and implementing new features, capabilities, tooling, visualisations, or even full products across our stack.
• Establishing and evolving our React component library, ensuring consistency, reusability, and alignment with our visual design standards across multiple front‐ends.
• Collaborating with others beyond your team and sharing knowledge with the wider frontend community at Helsing.
• Becoming a mentor and helping support and develop our interviewing pipeline.
• Sharing your experience and technical know‐how with other Helsingers through tech talks and smaller learning groups.
• Connecting with, understanding, and making changes to backend systems as needed.
• Presenting your work at our weekly demo sessions.

You should apply if you:

• Can write legible, maintainable, and performant front‐end code – ideally using TypeScript and React.
• Are experienced with APIs and server‐client communication like REST and GraphQL.
• Have experience with running a live production software.
• Are passionate about staying on top of current development best practices, libraries and frameworks.
• Are comfortable working with unfamiliar backends, ideally with some exposure to languages like Rust.
• Communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing.
• Enjoy collaborating with others, including reviewing code and pair programming.
• Are comfortable working asynchronously.
• Strive to improve yourself, your peers, and the culture you work in over time.
• Feel like ethical considerations are an inherent part of engineering.

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.

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, operating in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital.

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. 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.

Nice to have:

• Significant recent experience with React.
• Familiarity with backend interface tools like REST, GraphQL, gRPC/Protocol Buffers.
• Established understanding of modern JS bundlers, such as Vite.
• Experience with styling utility‐class libraries such as TailwindCSS.
• Data visualization expertise (e.g., D3.js, custom charting, or complex dashboard design).
• Background in designing software for aerospace, defense, or AI end users.

What we offer:

• A focus on outcomes, not time‐tracking.
• Competitive compensation and stock options.