Staff Software Engineer

We are looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to serve as a primary technical anchor, driving architectural decisions and shipping code across our backend systems. You will have the autonomy to own projects from zero to one prototyping through to deploying resilient software on physical hardware.

What you'll do

• Lead the review of complex code contributions, design proposals, and technical RFCs from colleagues. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others and mentoring is the highest-leverage work you can do.
• Architect, propose, and implement major new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or full products across our stack.
• Act as a key translator between engineering and the broader business, interfacing with product managers, programme leads, and customers to translate deep technical designs into clear, actionable insights.
• Actively mentor engineers, find mentees, and help drive and scale our technical interviewing pipeline.
• Maintain and evolve our existing software stack, partnering with internal and external stakeholders to diagnose complex system issues and address technical debt. Our stack is a mix of Rust and Python.
• Design and develop robust test architectures and benchmarks at the micro and macro level.

What you'll need

• Proven track record of writing highly legible, maintainable, and performance-optimised systems code.
• Systems-level thinker capable of designing for the long term and ensuring complex, heterogeneous systems integrate reliably end-to-end.
• Communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing, with the ability to articulate complex architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Thrive in a collaborative, low-ego environment with extensive experience running pair programming and peer code reviews.
• Seasoned, senior-to-staff level backend development experience, with expert-level mastery in a systems language like Rust, Java, Go, or C++.
• Natural multiplier striving to constantly improve yourself, your peers, and the engineering culture around you.

Nice to have

• Production-grade Rust and Python specifically.
• Container-based and cloud-native application architectures (e.g., Docker, Azure, AWS).
• Metrics and observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• SQL and high-throughput streaming database systems.
• Cryptographic protocols (e.g., Signal, WireGuard).
• Production ML systems and model deployment.

What they offer

• Work directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing ethical and geopolitical concerns.
• Operate in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital.
• Work at the state of the art in technical innovation including reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, and deployment infrastructure.