Staff Robotics Control Engineer (Humanoid Robotics)

Location: London, UK; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops commercially scalable and safe hirify.global robots, including the HMND-01 Alpha platform used in real industrial pilots.

What you will do

• Lead the evolution of whole-body control for the Wheeled Alpha platform, including task formulation, prioritisation, weighting, constraint handling, and solver selection.
• Coordinate the wheeled base, torso, and dual arms as one system while maintaining accurate and stable motion under aggressive commands and long-duration operation.
• Own self-collision avoidance, joint and velocity limit guarding, singularity handling, solver-feasibility recovery, and predictive MPC-based control development.
• Develop dynamic models covering inertial, gravity, friction, system identification, and online payload estimation.
• Advance impedance, admittance, force control, and stability-aware behaviour under contact, changing payloads, and dynamic motion.
• Integrate whole-body control with the safety architecture and mentor control engineers while working closely with hardware teams.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in optimisation-based whole-body control, including hierarchical and weighted QP formulations, task prioritisation, constraint handling, and real-time numerical robustness.
• Strong command of operational-space and task-space control, inverse dynamics, inverse kinematics, redundancy resolution, nullspace projection, impedance and admittance control, contact control, and force control.
• Experience deploying whole-body controllers on real high-DoF hardware such as hirify.globals, mobile manipulators, dual-arm, or legged platforms.
• Practical experience with QP/NLP solver conditioning, infeasibility, warm starts, solve-time budgets, and failure handling.
• Strong foundations in rigid-body kinematics and dynamics, Jacobians, URDF-based modelling, inertial and friction identification, and payload or external-load estimation.
• Expert modern C++ for real-time control, Python for analysis and prototyping, and a track record of production-reliable delivery, technical leadership, and mentoring.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of MPC formulations for whole-body or mobile-manipulation control.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive equity through stock options with meaningful upside.
• 30+ paid days off, including annual leave, UK bank holidays, and company closure days.
• Private healthcare with virtual and in-person care.
• Pension scheme with an 8% total contribution on full earnings.
• Daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in the office.
• Direct collaboration with engineering, research, product, and founding leadership on hirify.global robotics and AI.