Software Engineer, Platform Engineering AI & Engineering Washington, DC

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 join the Platform Engineering team, which architects, builds, and maintains a developer-focused platform that powers all of Helsing US's product and project teams. You will design and operate cloud infrastructure, deploy and maintain shared services like GitLab, Artifactory, and CI/CD pipelines, and build internal tooling that accelerates software delivery across the organization. You will also enable product teams with their own isolated environments - provisioning cloud accounts, standing up EKS clusters, databases, and the automation to make it all self-service and efficient. Security is foundational to this role: the platform must meet CMMC Level 2 compliance requirements, and you will help ensure that the infrastructure and software supply chain are built to satisfy ATO and NIST security controls.

The day-to-day

• Designing and maintaining cloud infrastructure across a multi-account AWS environment using Terraform and Terraform Enterprise

• Provisioning and managing EKS clusters, networking, IAM, and other AWS primitives for product and project teams

• Standing up and operating shared services (GitLab, Artifactory, CI/CD pipelines) and other developer tooling

• Building automation and self-service tooling that enables product teams to move quickly within secure guardrails

• Designing and deploying agentic AI workflows to streamline developer activities, infrastructure operations, and platform compliance

• Hosting and maintaining a mix of open-source, COTS, and internally developed services

• Supporting MLOps workloads - enabling model training pipelines and managing secure data at scale

• Building and maintaining observability and monitoring infrastructure for platform and product services

• Collaborating with product teams to understand their infrastructure needs and translate them into scalable, repeatable platform capabilities

• Working with engineering teams to ensure infrastructure meets CMMC and ATO requirements

You should apply if you

• Have 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or cloud engineering

• Have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

• Have strong experience with AWS, including GovCloud, multi-account architectures, Control Tower, IAM, VPC, EKS, and CloudFormation

• Are proficient with Terraform and have managed infrastructure at scale across multiple accounts, ideally using Terraform Enterprise or Terraform Cloud

• Have experience deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters in production

• Are proficient in Python and Bash, with experience writing automation and infrastructure tooling

• Are comfortable building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling

• Understand security fundamentals including FIPS encryption requirements and can build infrastructure that satisfies compliance frameworks like CMMC and NIST

• Can work across the stack, from cloud networking and IAM policies to Helm charts and container registries

• U.S. citizenship required

Nice to have

• Experience with Go or other systems programming languages

• Familiarity with ArgoCD and GitOps-based deployment patterns

• Experience with SIEM platforms (e.g., Elastic) and centralized logging architectures

• Experience supporting ML/AI workloads - GPU-backed instances, training pipelines, large dataset management

• Background in defense, intelligence, or other regulated environments requiring ATO

• Experience operating COTS products alongside custom-built internal services

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 responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about

What we offer

• A focus on outcomes, not time-tracking

• A generous compensation and benefits package (in addition to base salary) that includes, but may not be limited to, insurance coverage (medical and travel), flexible paid time off, paid holidays, and remote and/or hybrid work available depending on position. All compensation and benefits are subject to the terms and conditions of the underlying plans or programs, as applicable and as may be amended, terminated or superseded from time to time.

Helsing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, genetics, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

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