Our client is a London-based robotics company building humanoid and mobile-platform robots for industrial use: manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and construction. The focus is industrial deployment, not consumer or home robots. The company works with major industrial partners across Europe, the US, and APAC, and has run successful proof-of-concept deployments with several large manufacturers.
Responsibilities:
Post-train and fine-tune VLA models for defined industrial manipulation tasks.
Develop and improve learned manipulation policies using approaches such as behavioral cloning, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning.
Run experiments on physical robot prototypes and iterate based on real-world performance.
Work with data collection and teleoperation pipelines to build and refine training data for manipulation tasks.
Collaborate with Controls, Simulation, and Hardware Design teams to move policies from simulation to deployment.
Evaluate model performance, diagnose failure modes, and drive measurable improvements in task success rates.
Requirements:
Hands-on experience with robotic manipulation, from either industry or academia.
Practical experience with learned manipulation policies: VLA fine-tuning, behavioral cloning, imitation learning, or related methods.
Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
Experience with robotics simulation environments, for example IsaacSim or MuJoCo.
Familiarity with reinforcement learning and vision-language models.
Willingness to work on-site in London daily, including with physical robot hardware.
Considered a plus:
Experience bridging simulation and real hardware (sim-to-real).
A PhD or research background in robotics, robot learning, or a related field, ideally with applied or industry-collaboration exposure.
Published work or shipped systems involving manipulation.
Working conditions:
Competitive base salary, with equity on top (level-dependent), giving early team members meaningful upside ahead of the funding round closing.
23 days of annual leave, plus the Christmas period and UK bank holidays.
15 paid sick days.
3 weeks of maternity and paternity leave.
Relocation support: reimbursement of up to £8,000 for international moves and up to £2,500 for domestic moves (covering shipping, travel, temporary accommodation, and legal fees).
Visa sponsorship: Skilled Worker Visa as standard, Global Talent Visa in exceptional cases.