Forward Strategist

Who we are

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards.

As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously.

We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications.

The role

Forward Strategists at Helsing sit at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and Operations. Where engineering builds the system, the Forward Strategist works alongside it: landing in ambiguity, understanding the technical shape of the problem, and building a path through it that engineering, product, and operations teams can execute against. We deploy Forward Strategists against the highest-leverage problems in the company, where you will embed deeply in the technical and product work, take full ownership of outcomes, and leave behind systems, tooling, and clarity that keep delivering long after you have moved on.

The day-to-day

• Take a poorly-defined technical or product problem, establish what it actually is, and build a structured path to resolution, setting direction through the ambiguity

• Deliver on that path end-to-end, prioritising ruthlessly, working across product, engineering, operations, commercial, hardware, and legal domains, and owning the outcome until it ships

• Make sound, well-evidenced calls on technical and product trade-offs under uncertainty, commit to them, and adapt when the facts change, without deferring decisions or sitting on the fence

• Work close to the codebase and system architecture, translating ambiguous requirements into technical specifications that engineering teams can build against

• Build alignment across product, engineering, and operations teams without relying on formal authority, communicate a clear technical vision, and coach others toward it

• Leave the organisation permanently better, building tooling, processes, and technical documentation that scale beyond what you can personally produce

You should apply if you

• Have landed in an ambiguous, high-stakes technical environment with no predefined strategy and turned it into a shipped, structured outcome

• Have built tools, systems, or software that outlasted your involvement and continued to generate value for engineering and product teams

• Reason from first principles into unfamiliar technical domains quickly, whether distributed systems, deployment infrastructure, or product architecture, and become the person others come to for the answer

• Have a track record of making clear, well-reasoned calls, backing them with evidence, and holding to them while remaining genuinely open to changing your view when the facts shift

• Have brought engineering and product teams with you without formal authority, built alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders, and shaped how others think about a problem or outcome

• Are comfortable working close to a codebase, engineering trade-offs, and technical roadmaps, even if you are not the one writing the production code

Note: We operate in an industry where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

Nice to have

• Experience operating within or alongside a product or engineering function, with a working understanding of software development lifecycles, deployment pipelines, and technical trade-offs

• Exposure to a high-ambiguity environment, whether as a founder, early operator, or technical consultant to growth-stage companies, where the job description mattered far less than the systems and outcomes you owned

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

• Competitive salary and stock options (VSOP)

• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation

• Learning: €500/£450 yearly allowance

• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health)

• Social: regular company events and monthly social allowances

• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers

• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work

These are the core benefits across all locations; there may be additional benefits in specific sites.