Description
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 an AI Research Engineer - Reinforcement Learning, you will have the unique opportunity to shape the future of AI in one of the most challenging sectors, where performance needs to be paired with high generalisation capabilities and strong robustness against adversarial attacks.
You will build the autonomy brain for a cutting-edge autonomous aerial platform that will actually take flight. You will develop and integrate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agents into the operational systems of our own Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle, the CA-1 Europa, as part of the groundbreaking Centaur project.
Responsibilities:
- Hold a MSc in Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Automation and Control, or a closely related field, with a strong focus on sequential decision-making and autonomous systems.
- Have hands-on experience building, training, and deploying reinforcement learning agents.
- Be deeply familiar with modern RL and multi-agent RL techniques, including but not limited to: model-free methods (e.g. PPO, SAC), population-based training, handling of partial observability and long horizons.
- Have experience integrating RL policies into high-performance runtime systems, with a solid understanding of the latency and throughput constraints that come with real-time autonomous decision-making.
- Possess solid software engineering skills, writing clean and well-structured code in Python and/or languages like Rust or modern C++.
- Have excellent communication skills and the ability to report and present research findings clearly and efficiently, both internally and externally.
Nice to have:
- PhD in Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent Systems, Automation and Control, Robotics, or a related field, with publications in top-tier venues.
- Experience with large-scale distributed RL training frameworks, the infrastructure challenges of running thousands of parallel simulation environments, and gpu-based simulators.
- Experience modelling and training multi-agent controllers using state-of-the-art techniques, including emergent coordination, competitive self-play, or decentralised execution with centralised training.
- Familiarity with flight dynamics, aerospace systems, or guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) concepts.
- Experience deploying AI software to safety-critical production systems, including formal verification, testing pipelines, and runtime monitoring.
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