Machine Learning Engineer
Posted 18 Aug 2026
Advertised as “Machine Learning Engineer, Detection and Tracking”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
No salary listed for this role.
Field of studyComputer Science, Electrical Engineering (or related)
Study levelBachelor's
Study levelMaster's or higher
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
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Training and fine-tuning detection models (YOLO, DETR, Faster R-CNN, and similar architectures) on mission-specific datasets
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Implementing and improving multi-object tracking pipelines (SORT, DeepSORT, ByteTrack, or similar)
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Evaluating model performance: analyzing metrics, diagnosing failure modes, and iterating on data and model improvements
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Managing the data pipeline end-to-end: assessing raw data, coordinating annotation, curating datasets, and implementing augmentation strategies
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Optimizing models for deployment on SWaP-constrained and embedded platforms (quantization, pruning, TensorRT, ONNX export)
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Collaborating with systems engineers to integrate models into the broader Altra platform
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Working across sensor modalities as needed, including electro-optical, infrared, and other imaging sources
You should apply if you
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Have 5+ years of experience in applied machine learning or computer vision
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Have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field; Master's or PhD strongly preferred
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Have production experience training and deploying object detection models — not just research or academic projects
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Are proficient in Python and PyTorch or a comparable deep learning framework
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Have strong intuition for data quality; you can look at annotated datasets, training curves, and evaluation metrics and know what's wrong