Machine Learning Engineer, Detection and Tracking

Who we are

Helsing develops artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities to protect and defend democracies. We build Altra, an AI-powered drone software platform, and HX-2, our autonomous drone. We are growing our US operations, cultivating an ambitious and committed team of mission-driven professionals to apply their skills to solve challenging problems.

The role

You will own the detection and tracking models that power Helsing's products — training, tuning, and deploying models against US-specific datasets. This is an applied ML role: you won't be writing research papers, but you will be expected to have strong intuition for model performance, data quality, and the practical trade-offs involved in getting detection and tracking systems to work reliably in production. You will manage the full model lifecycle — from assessing and curating training data through annotation, training, evaluation, and deployment to edge platforms.

The day-to-day

Training and fine-tuning detection models (YOLO, DETR, Faster R-CNN, and similar architectures) on mission-specific datasets

Implementing and improving multi-object tracking pipelines (SORT, DeepSORT, ByteTrack, or similar)

Evaluating model performance: analyzing metrics, diagnosing failure modes, and iterating on data and model improvements

Managing the data pipeline end-to-end: assessing raw data, coordinating annotation, curating datasets, and implementing augmentation strategies

Optimizing models for deployment on SWaP-constrained and embedded platforms (quantization, pruning, TensorRT, ONNX export)

Collaborating with systems engineers to integrate models into the broader Altra platform

Working across sensor modalities as needed, including electro-optical, infrared, and other imaging sources

You should apply if you

Have 5+ years of experience in applied machine learning or computer vision

Have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field; Master's or PhD strongly preferred

Have production experience training and deploying object detection models — not just research or academic projects

Are proficient in Python and PyTorch or a comparable deep learning framework

Have strong intuition for data quality; you can look at annotated datasets, training curves, and evaluation metrics and know what's wrong

Have experience with the full model training lifecycle: data curation, annotation management, training, evaluation, and deployment

Have experience optimizing models for deployment on SWaP-constrained and edge platforms (TensorRT, ONNX, quantization)

Understand multi-object tracking and have implemented or worked with tracking algorithms in practice

Can read and contextualize scientific papers in computer vision and apply findings to production systems

Are a U.S. citizen with an active security clearance or the ability to obtain one

Nice to have

Strong proficiency in Rust or C++ for production model deployment and optimization

Experience with multiple sensor modalities — particularly infrared or thermal imaging

Familiarity with MLOps tooling: experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights Biases), dataset versioning, model registries

Experience with annotation tools and workflows (CVAT, Label Studio, or similar)

Background in computer vision beyond detection — segmentation, pose estimation, activity recognition

Experience with simulators, emulators, or synthetic data generation for training and evaluation

Experience deploying models on GPU-accelerated embedded platforms (NVIDIA Jetson, similar)

Background in defense, intelligence, or other mission-critical environments

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 defense 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 practice responsi…