Lead IT Engineer

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

We are looking for a Lead IT Engineer to set the technical direction of Helsing's corporate IT. You will own the architecture across identity, endpoints, networking and cloud. You will also build the foundations, pipelines and engineering practices that let the team make changes safely, repeatably and with a full audit trail. You will still get hands-on when a problem calls for it, but most of your impact will come from design, technical decisions and raising the engineering bar across the IT team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. Helsing is growing fast across new offices, production sites and customer environments, many of them with strict security and regulatory requirements. The systems you design will support the engineers and AI specialists building capabilities that protect democracies.

The day-to-day

Own the technical architecture of our corporate IT estate and set the standards the team builds to Design and build IT tooling, including reusable Terraform modules, remote state, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management and e2e testing

Scope, plan and lead major IT projects from concept to delivery, such as new office and production site builds, identity and device management changes, and cloud-hosted, segmented or air-gapped environments

Act as the senior technical escalation point for IT Support and IT Engineering, and step in hands-on on the hardest problems

Mentor engineers formally and informally, helping the team build the skills to work confidently in a code-first way

You should apply if you

Have significant experience in IT engineering, infrastructure or DevOps, including time as the technical lead or architect for a corporate IT or cloud estate

Are comfortable with DevOps practices such as Git workflows, pipelines, code review and secrets management, and want to bring them into an IT team

Have deep expertise in Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, including Conditional Access, SSO and identity lifecycle

Have experience managing macOS and Windows fleets with Jamf and Intune Understand enterprise networking and Zero Trust access

Lead through technical credibility, explain trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to Have

Experience managing SaaS platforms through Terraform, such as Entra ID, Jamf, Okta or Meraki

Experience with policy as code or automated compliance checks

Experience in regulated or classified environments, such as BSI IT-Grundschutz, VS-NfD, ISO 27001, CE+ or NIS2

AWS experience, particularly IAM, Organizations, IAM Identity Center and networking

Linux server administration and virtualisation with Proxmox, VMware or Hyper-V, including on-prem and air-gapped datacentre builds

Infrastructure and networking experience in Azure

Experience with security tooling such as Microsoft Defender, Purview and vulnerability management platforms like Tenable.

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 VSOP options

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

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 (Specifically for engineering and AI)

These are the core benefits across all locations, there may be additional benefits in certain locations.

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.

Helsing's Candidate Privacy and Confidentiality Regime can be found here .