Lead IT Engineer

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.

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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 labe