Machine Learning Engineer, Detection and Tracking
Helsing
| Company | Helsing |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | Washington |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Not stated |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 18 Jun 2026 |
| Last verified | 31 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (greenhouse) |
Description
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 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
Nice to have
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, s