Software Engineering Apprentice

Company DescriptionHelm is building the infrastructure layer for world simulation. Physics tools cannot model human behavior. Social AI cannot model physics. Economic tools cannot model either. Helm composes all of them into one platform, so a drought can trigger crop failure, commodity prices can spike, consumer sentiment can shift, and policy can respond, all inside a single pipeline. Teams in defense, reinsurance, energy, and public policy use it to model reality before they bet on it. Every prediction is scored against ground truth, so users know how much to trust the output. The same way containers standardized compute and SQL standardized data, we are building the standard interface for simulation.Role DescriptionThe Software Engineering Apprentice is a full time role for an exceptional early career engineer who wants to learn by shipping into a real production system rather than by working through a curriculum. This is not a rotation, a shadowing program, or a ticket queue. You will be given scoped, real work from your first week, paired with a senior engineer who reviews everything you write, and expected to grow into owning entire surfaces of the product.What that work looks like will change as you do. Early on it is likely to be well defined pieces of the platform: building out the World Library of simulation primitives, writing engine adapters so a new simulation model plugs into the orchestration layer, extending the validation suite that benchmarks runs against historical data, or working on the builder tools that let users configure scenarios and agent populations without writing code. Later it means taking a problem that is still ambiguous and coming back with something that works.You will read a lot of code you did not write. You will ask a lot of questions. You will get direct feedback in code review, sometimes more than is comfortable, because that is the fastest way anyone has found to get good. The point of the apprenticeship is that in twelve months you are operating as an engineer, not as an apprentice.QualificationsDegree, or currently enrolled, in computer science, engineering, physics, mathematics, or a closely related technical field from a top university.Strong academic record in technical coursework. Algorithms, systems, and anything quantitative matter more to us than your overall GPA.You build things outside of coursework. Personal projects, open source contributions, research code, a game, a tool you made because something annoyed you. Class assignments alone do not tell us much.Comfortable in at least one language, ideally Python or TypeScript, and able to read code in others without panicking.Curious about simulation, modeling, or systems that try to predict the world. You do not need a physics or economics background, but you should find the problem genuinely interesting, because you will be reading about it constantly.Takes feedback well. You can have your work marked up in review and treat it as information rather than as a verdict on you.Can work through being stuck. You know how to debug, when to search, when to read the source, and when to ask for help instead of burning a day on pride.Clear communicator in writing. Most of the work is asynchronous and you will need to explain what you did and why.