Forward Strategist

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.

Forward Strategists at Helsing sit at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and Operations. Where engineering solves the technical problem, the Forward Strategist solves everything else: landing in chaos, finding the shape of the problem, and building a path through it. We deploy Forward Strategists against the highest-leverage problems in the company, where you will embed deeply in the work, take full ownership of outcomes, and leave behind systems and clarity that keep delivering long after you have moved on.

The day-to-day

• Take a poorly-defined 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, operations, commercial, hardware, legal, and technical domains, and owning the outcome until it becomes reality

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

• Bring people with you: build alignment across teams and stakeholders without relying on formal authority, communicate a clear vision of the outcome, and coach others toward it

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

You should apply if you

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

• Have built tooling, systems, or processes that outlasted your involvement and continued to generate value for the organisation

• Can reason from first principles into unfamiliar domains quickly, whether product, operations, commercial, or technical, 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 people with you without formal authority, built alignment across teams, and shaped how others think about a problem or outcome

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.

• Experience operating within or alongside a product or