Machine Learning Engineer, Detection and Tracking

About the role

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. 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

Requirements

• 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
• 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 respons

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