Application Security Engineer at Helsing

Who we are

The role 

We are building Europe’s premier AI research and software engineering teams across disciplines including streaming data processing, edge networking, probabilistic inference, 3D computer graphics, and many more. Our ambitions are enormous. Your mission is to protect Helsing, our partners, and our customers through ensuring the application security of Helsing’s deployed products. 

You’ll be working as part of our broader Security Engineering team, who are responsible for all aspects of information security across Helsing’s technology stack, including the security of our deployed software products, our development processes, and our IT and development infrastructure. Recent areas of focus for our Security Engineering team have included a rearchitecture of Helsing’s cloud infrastructure; development and deployment of CI tooling to perform automated security scans; securing the boot chain of trust for Helsing products deployed onto hardware in the field; rolling out a security information and event management system; and running regular application security workshops. 

The day-to-day 

• Review contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others takes precedence over spending more time on your own work

• Collaborate with Helsing’s leadership team to shape secure development practices, and then own implementation

• Act as a trusted advisor and evangelist to our AI researchers and software engineers during the complete lifecycle of our products, from design to implementation to operation

• Build tools and infrastructure to automate your solutions

• Share your experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers. We host tech talks, get together for smaller “let’s learn together” groups, run topical office hours, etc. to help each other improve

You should apply if you 

• Have experience in software engineering with a passion for secure applications and technical systems 

• Can perform whitebox and blackbox security reviews of applications to identify security vulnerabilities 

• Understand cloud-native software systems, including cloud security, container-based architecture, and networking 

• Can code in a high-level programming language such as Rust, Python, or C++ 

• Can design and operationalise Software Supply Chain Security practices 

• Can communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing, especially on technical topics 

• Are comfortable working asynchronously (writing PRs and RFCs, having discussions by email) 

• Are eligible for and are happy to apply for national security clearance in the country in which you will be based

Note: The above bullet points describe the ideal candidate. None of us matched all of these at once when we first joined Helsing. We encourage you to apply even if you believe you meet only part of our wish list.

Nice to have 

• An understanding of AWS paradigms and deploying secure infrastructure in AWS 

• Experience working with Nix/NixOS or similar reproducible build tooling 

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 defence 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 practise 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 

• Competitive compensation and stock options 

• Relocation support 

• Social and education allowances 

• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe 

• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled “Infraduction”), in which you will be building tooling and applications to be used across the company. This is your opportunity to learn our tech stack, explore the company, and learn how we get things done - all whilst working with other engineering teams from day one