Software Engineer - Airborne Mission Systems

About the role

At Helsing, you'll be shaping the foundational capabilities for our own Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), the CA-1 Europa. You will be building the higher-level mission control foundation — the sophisticated infrastructure that enables real-time sensor processing, secure communication, seamless integration of autonomous decision-making modules, and reliable interfacing with lower-level flight control systems. Your code will be critical to the CA-1 Europa's ability to fly, perceive, and operate effectively in the most demanding environments.

What you'll do

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues, ensuring robustness and adherence to safety and performance standards critical for airborne applications.
• Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or full products across our stack, with a focus on refining the capabilities and reliability of our airborne mission systems.
• Become a mentor, find a mentee, and help support and develop our interviewing pipeline.
• Maintain our existing software stack, including working with internal and external customers to identify issues, improving operational reliability and performance, and fending off technical debt. The stack is a mix of Rust and Python.
• Further develop our tests and benchmarks, including hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations and flight testing.
• Present your work at our weekly demo sessions.

What you'll need

• Ability to write legible, maintainable, and performant code.
• Strong communication skills in English, both verbally and in writing.
• Enjoyment of collaborating with others, including reviewing code and pair programming on complex system architectures involving tight hardware-software integration.
• Comfort working asynchronously (writing PRs and RFCs, having discussions by email).
• Strong backend or embedded development experience, ideally with Rust, Go, or C++.
• Comfort developing distributed systems.

Nice to have

• Significant experience with Rust.
• Network programming experience.
• Experience designing or implementing custom runtime environments, sandboxing, or secure execution contexts for third-party code.
• Experience with avionics, flight control systems, or Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC).