Manipulation Capabilities Engineer (Robotics)

Location: On-site in London daily, working directly with physical robot hardware.

Company

London-based robotics company building humanoid and mobile-platform robots for industrial use in collaboration with major partners across Europe, the US, and APAC.

What you will do

• Post-train and fine-tune VLA models for defined industrial manipulation tasks.
• Develop learned manipulation policies using behavioral cloning, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning.
• Run experiments on physical robot prototypes and iterate based on real-world performance.
• Build and refine manipulation training data through data collection and teleoperation pipelines.
• Collaborate with Controls, Simulation, and Hardware Design teams to move policies from simulation to deployment.
• Evaluate model performance, diagnose failure modes, and improve task success rates.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with robotic manipulation in industry or academia.
• Practical experience with learned manipulation policies, including VLA fine-tuning, behavioral cloning, or imitation learning.
• Proficiency in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with robotics simulation environments such as IsaacSim or MuJoCo.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning and vision-language models.
• Willingness to work on-site in London daily with physical robot hardware.

Nice to have

• Experience bridging simulation and real hardware through sim-to-real techniques.
• PhD or research background in robotics, robot learning, or a related field.
• Published research or shipped systems involving robotic manipulation.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive base salary with equity depending on level.
• Private health insurance and pension scheme with employee, employer, and tax-relief contributions.
• 23 days of annual leave, plus the Christmas period and UK bank holidays.
• 15 paid sick days and three weeks of maternity and paternity leave.
• Relocation support of up to £8,000 for international moves and up to £2,500 for domestic moves.
• Skilled Worker Visa sponsorship as standard, with Global Talent Visa sponsorship available in exceptional cases.