Founding Research Scientist (Physical AI)

Location: Bermondsey, London, United Kingdom — fully onsite

Salary: £80,000–£160,000 base salary per year plus equity

Company

Venture-backed Physical AI startup building models that enable robots to learn and act in the real world.

What you will do

• Shape the research direction and help build the robotics research lab from its earliest days.
• Develop VLA and world-model post-training approaches, progressing toward pretraining models from scratch.
• Develop cross-embodiment transfer so one model can operate across multiple robot bodies.
• Define data strategies and evaluate models on physical robots.
• Orchestrate VLMs for robotic perception, reasoning, and action.
• Own experiments from initial ideas through deployment on real hardware and publish technical reports and papers.

Requirements

• Experience in robot learning, imitation learning, VLAs, world models, manipulation, or perception as a PhD student, postdoc, or industry researcher.
• Strong machine learning research experience; researchers transitioning into robotics are also welcome.
• Experience with Unitree G1 robots and deploying learned policies on physical hardware.
• Experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim for simulation, evaluation, and sim-to-real workflows.
• Experience with VLM orchestration within robotics systems.

Nice to have

• Publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, or NeurIPS.
• Benchmark experience or contributions to LeRobot, openpi, or Isaac.

Culture & Benefits

• Founding research ownership and equity.
• Access to robots for hands-on experimentation.
• Fast training and evaluation loops.
• Fully onsite work in Bermondsey, London.

Hiring process

• Apply directly or email khorsley@acceler8talent.com.