About Parloa

Parloa’s mission is to make every customer conversation feel effortless for both customers and the companies serving them. As agentic AI accelerates, Parloans are shaping the foundation of a new era in customer experience, one where customer support is no longer transactions, but meaningful exchanges. It is not just a vision; Parloa has powered over ONE BILLION interactions between global enterprise brands and their customers, with companies like IKEA and Booking.com already deploying Parloa at scale. 

About the role:

As a Principal Applied Scientist at Parloa, you will define and drive our applied AI strategy across AI agents and Generative AI.

This is a highly hands-on and high-impact role at the intersection of research and production. You will explore, validate, and scale approaches that directly shape our product, from model evaluation and routing to agent behavior, memory, and context engineering, while defining how these systems should be measured, benchmarked, and improved across the industry.

Beyond execution, you will act as a technical leader: identifying opportunities, setting direction, and building the foundations of applied science at Parloa.

Areas of ownership:

• Define and lead applied AI initiatives across agent systems, LLM evaluation, and model optimization
• Own ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end: from framing and experimentation to production impact
• Design and implement evaluation & benchmarking frameworks, leveraging and challenging industry standards — and where needed, defining new ones
• Drive innovation in agentic systems, including topics like routing, memory, and context engineering
• Prototype and validate new approaches (e.g., model combinations, fine-tuning strategies, or open-weight models)
• Translate research into production-ready solutions, working closely with engineering teams
• Act as a technical authority and multiplier, mentoring others and shaping best practices
• Establish and lead the Applied Science guild, fostering knowledge sharing and raising the bar across teams
• Influence product and technical strategy, identifying where applied science can unlock the most value

Who you are:

• 12+ years of experience in Applied Machine Learning, Applied Science, or a related field, with a proven track record of delivering ML/AI systems in production
• Experience with agent-based systems or multi-step LLM workflows
• Strong recent experience working with LLMs and Generative AI systems, ideally in production environments
• Demonstrated ability to own and drive ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end—from problem framing to measurable impact
• Deep understanding of evaluation methodologies, benchmarking, and model performance analysis, including human-in-the-loop approaches
• Hands-on technical skills, with the ability to prototype, experiment, and ship solutions in collaboration with engineering teams
• Experience working on production systems, balancing speed, quality, and scalability
• Proven technical leadership and influence, with experience shaping direction, mentoring others, or driving cross-team initiatives
• Ability to operate at both strategic and execution levels, connecting long-term vision with day-to-day decisions
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate ideas and influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Evidence of broader impact (e.g., published work, open-source contributions, internal initiatives, or industry influence) is a plus

We know that great candidates don’t always meet every single requirement. If you’re excited about this role and believe you could make an impact, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn’t perfectly match every qualification.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with model routing, fine-tuning, or open-weight models
• Background in human-in-the-loop evaluation or annotation systems
• Contributions to public research, blogs, or open-source projects

Our recruiting process:

Talent Acquisition → Technical Peer Interview → 360° Technical Interview Loop → Bar Raiser

Why Parloa?

We’re at the beginning of a new era in customer experience, one where AI doesn’t just respond, but understands, reasons, and takes action. We’re building agentic AI that enterprises trust with their most important customer moments: complex questions, high volumes, real stakes. When millions of people reach out to a brand, those interactions aren’t just support tickets; they’re defining experiences. We’re here to raise the standard: making every conversation seamless, intelligent, and genuinely helpful. If you care about shaping how businesses and customers connect at scale—and want your work to matter in real, everyday moments—this is where you do it.

At Parloa, ownership isn’t a buzzword; it means being accountable for outcomes, not just tasks. We operate in a category that’s evolving fast, where the bar is high, and the problems are complex. We hire people who think in solutions, communicate with clarity, and follow through. People who are comfortable making decisions, taking responsibility, and raising the standard for themselves and those around them.

We’ve grown beyond the earliest startup phase, but we’ve kept the intensity: fast execution, direct feedback, and a strong expectation to contribute meaningfully from day one.

Backed by leading global investors like General Catalyst, EQT Ventures, and Altimeter Capital, we’re scaling with a clear ambition: to become the global category leader in enterprise-grade conversational AI.

Who we are

The role

The day-to-day

As a company, we are defining how software and AI works in mission-critical situations in defence. We need Product Managers who can wade into a promising product area and leverage customers, teammates, and leadership to develop an idea into a prototype and a prototype into a product, with a matching business strategy.

It’s a big role, and most people don’t have all the skills yet. We’re looking for capable, motivated people who we can develop into Product Management all-stars.

You should apply if you

• Have proven experience in a broad role of product management within a company, from commercial through to technical, taking products from ideation to market.
• Proven experience in computer vision and image analysis
• Have a willingness to lean into uncertainty and lead a team in the discovery of a new product and its co-creation with our customers
• Have technical depth, ideally coming from a technical background as a software engineer or data scientist. As well as technical understanding of how you bring together best in class AI and software with hardware systems.
• Have the intellectual curiosity to learn about the many new areas you’ll be taken into: radar systems; defence procurement; military doctrine; node computing; defence-industrial policy; few-shot learning; and so on…
• Have personal values which match ours: ownership, initiative, dedication to mission, speed and inclusiveness 

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.

Nice to Have

• Experience in defence or space related product management.
• Experience with satellite related technologies and systems. 

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

• Occupational Pension and Disability Insurance

• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation

• Learning: €500 yearly allowance

• Health & wellness: gym membership, mental health support (Nilo.health) and cycle scheme

• Social: regularly 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, remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work at full pay

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.

Role

As a Senior Research Scientist focused on Robotic Foundation Models, you will be responsible for the design and implementation of systems that enable the training, deployment, and utilization of large-scale AI models for robotics. You will guide technical direction, mentor engineers, and ensure the development of robust, scalable ML models  required to make robots significantly more capable in real-world environments. Your work will empower both internal teams and external partners by providing accessible tools and infrastructure for injecting advanced machine learning techniques into robotic applications.

How your work moves the mission forward

• Lead the design and implementation of infrastructure and architecture of large-scale robotic foundation models.
• Oversee the training and deployment of robust ML models for high-performance robotic applications.
• Empower ML researchers and engineers with accessible tools and infrastructure for developing and applying AI techniques in robotics.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to define infrastructure requirements and deliver successful solutions for partners and customers.

Skills you will need to be successful

• PhD in Computer Science / Engineering with a specialization in Machine Learning and / or Robotics.
• Experience collaborating on medium to large software projects for at least 4 years.
• Experience in programming Python / C++ and machine learning frameworks (Tensorflow, JAX).
• Demonstrable experience with offline Reinforcement / Imitation Learning in a robotics context.
• Proven ability to work with a team, setting directions and driving towards solutions.

Skills that will differentiate your candidacy

• Academic track record of publications in the field of offline Reinforcement / Imitation Learning in Robotics.
• Experience with Robotic Foundation Models / Vision-Language-Action Models.
• Experience with Online Reinforcement Learning and / or Computer Vision for Robotics.
• Experience with deploying ML services at scale, e.g., via cloud computing and containerization (Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes), databases (SQL, no-SQL), and service-oriented architecture frameworks.