AI Research Engineer - GPU Simulation

Who We Are

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

Join our GPU simulation team and build the simulator that trains our reinforcement-learning agents for air autonomy. You will shape the simulator that turns complex air-combat scenarios into learning environments at scale, model the physics behind air combat, and support the transfer of those policies to the real aircraft. Your work will span flight model fidelity, scaling to thousands of parallel environments, and the training tooling that makes it all possible. This role sits at the meeting point of AI, GPU computing and physics-based simulation, with room to grow into a leadership position as the team matures.

The Day-to-Day

• Build, extend, and scale our GPU-based simulator to train reinforcement-learning agents across thousands of parallel environments.
• Develop the tooling that underpins RL training, including domain randomisation, to improve sim-to-real generalisation.
• Improve the fidelity and performance of simulation models, from flight dynamics to sensing.
• Enable sim-to-real transfer by supporting the export of trained policies and assets into downstream simulators and, ultimately, onto physical hardware.
• Collaborate with AI specialists and engineers to align the simulator with training needs and mission-relevant outcomes.

You Should Apply If You

• Hold an MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Control Engineering, or a closely related field.
• Possess solid software engineering skills, writing clean and well-structured code in Python and/or languages like Rust or modern C++, and have experience deploying software to production including testing, and monitoring.
• Bring depth in at least one of the following: GPU programming, high-performance simulation, physics or flight-dynamics modelling, or navigation and control.
• Own high-quality, maintainable code and shape the shared library and ecosystem that the wider team builds on.
• Care about our mission and want your work to have real operational impact.

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

• Have solid AI knowledge and can reason about how models are trained and evaluated.
• Have knowledge breadth across the specialist areas above, for example combining GPU programming with simulation environment design.
• Have deep GPU expertise, such as writing and optimising CUDA kernels, or expertise in libraries such as Taichi, NVIDIA Warp/CuteDSL, Triton or Helion.

Join Helsing

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.