Senior Security Engineer

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 of Security Engineering at Helsing sits at the intersection of deep technical expertise, adversarial thinking, and real-world impact. You'll work across the full breadth of our technology — from cloud infrastructure to applications, identity systems, and products — identifying and reducing the security risks that matter most. The systems we build and the data we handle demand a security posture that is rigorous, adaptive, and deeply embedded in everything we do. You'll directly shape our ability to earn and maintain the trust of partners, customers, and the public, while ensuring our teams can build and ship with confidence. At Helsing, where the stakes of what we build are unusually high, this work is central to delivering on our mission responsibly.

The day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Identify, assess, and prioritise security risks across our systems, products, and infrastructure - distinguishing between theoretical concerns and material threats to the business.
• Design and implement practical security controls across cloud platforms, applications, products, and data - and guide engineering teams in doing the same.
• Develop and apply threat models to surface architectural risks, trust boundary issues, and failure modes before they become incidents.
• Partner with engineering, product, and operational teams as a trusted security adviser - providing patterns, guidance, and guardrails rather than one-off approvals or blockers.
• Contribute to the detection, investigation, and containment of security incidents, and drive systemic improvements from what we learn.
• Reduce manual and reactive security work by building automation, improving tooling, and embedding secure-by-default practices into how we develop and operate systems.
• Bring technical depth to assurance activities such as audits, certifications, and customer security reviews - ensuring our controls are real and effective, not just documented.

You should apply if you:

• Have deep hands-on expertise in one or two security domains - such as application security, cloud security, identity and access management, cryptography, detection and response, or platform security - and can demonstrate genuine impact within them.
• Think in terms of trust boundaries, failure modes, blast radius, and adversarial behaviour rather than individual vulnerabilities in isolation.
• Can translate complex security risk into language that resonates with non-security stakeholders - engineers, product managers, and senior leadership alike - and influence outcomes without relying on authority.
• Approach security with a risk-based mindset, making proportionate, well-reasoned decisions under uncertainty and consistently asking whether the work you are doing reduces material risk rather than simply satisfying a compliance requirement.
• Have experience working across multiple teams and technical domains simultaneously, maintaining quality and judgement across contexts.
• Have a track record of identifying gaps and driving security improvements to resolution, including in ambiguous or loosely scoped problem spaces.

Note: We operate in an industry 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:

• Experience working in or alongside regulated, high-assurance, or defence-adjacent environments where security requirements are complex and the consequences of failure are significant.
• Hands‑on offensive security experience - red teaming, penetration testing, or adversarial simulation - that informs how you approach defensive design and threat modelling.
• Familiarity with security considerations specific to AI or machine learning systems, including model integrity, data pipeline security, or adversarial ML concepts.
• Experience designing or contributing to security programmes at scale - security champions networks, secure development lifecycle tooling, or organisation‑wide risk frameworks.
• Background in cloud-native security engineering, particularly across AWS, GCP, or Azure, including infrastructure-as-code, container security, and cloud identity patterns.
• Exposure to supply chain security concerns, including dependency management, build pipeline integrity, or third‑party component assurance.
• Experience operating in environments with classified data, government security frameworks, or cross-domain security requirements.

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.

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: regularly 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.