Senior Physical AI Engineer

About the Company

Early conversations on behalf of a profitable, independent, deep-tech robotics company in London with thirty years of engineering depth behind it, not a six-month-old company running on funding alone.

About the Role

Nothing is live yet. This is genuine market mapping before a role gets built, and I'd love to hear from people who might be a fit whether or not the timing works for you right now. No pitch, no vacancy details, just understanding what's out there and what would genuinely move someone.

What this is

• Real, hands-on production experience in reinforcement learning for manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and domain randomisation for contact-rich tasks. Academic exposure alone isn't enough.
• Trained models that actually control a physical robot, not just software.
• Taken something that works in simulation and made it survive contact with the real world.
• Comfortable owning a technical direction and turning it into an actual engineering plan, and bringing a team with you.

What this isn't

• General AI, ML engineering, LLMs or chatbots. Genuinely valuable work, just not this.
• A search for someone who's already shipped a finished physical AI product at scale. Almost nobody has, at this stage of the field, and that's fine.

Nice to have

A PhD or years in robotics, RL or controls is a plus, but not a gate. If your track record speaks for itself, that's what counts.

Basis

Full-time and part-time or fractional arrangements both genuinely being considered, so don't rule yourself out on that basis alone.

(You may see a version of this appear as either Senior or Principal, depending on the calibre of person we find. Same conversation either way.)