Senior ML Engineer (VLA & Navigation)

Humanoid is the first AI and robotics company in the UK, creating the world’s most advanced, reliable, commercially scalable, and safe humanoid robots. Our first humanoid robot HMND 01 is a next-gen labour automation unit, providing highly efficient services across various use cases, starting with industrial applications.

We are looking for the Senior ML Engineer (VLA & Navigation) to join our team based in London, UK.

What You'll Do

• Develop next-generation spatial understanding systems for robot locomotion and manipulation, integrating perception and high-level reasoning.
• Work on open-ended navigation powered by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models — enabling robots to understand context, predict intent, and act in complex, dynamic environments.
• Design and scale auto-labeling and large-scale data pipelines to train and evaluate multimodal models for navigation and interaction.
• Develop and implement scene understanding and 3D reconstruction methods that give robots persistent spatial memory and geometric awareness.
• Collaborate with cross-functional research and engineering teams to bring large vision-language models into real-world robotic systems.
• Stay ahead of the field — rapidly evaluate new model architectures, benchmarks, and datasets to guide our embodied AI roadmap

What We're Looking For

• Deep experience in machine learning for vision or embodied AI, ideally with large models (VLMs, VLAs, transformers, diffusion, or multi-modal architectures).
• Strong background in scene understanding, spatial reasoning, or 3D reconstruction from visual data.
• Proficiency in PyTorch and hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, and deploying large-scale ML systems.
• Strong experimental and research skills — capable of taking projects from concept to model training, evaluation, and robot integration.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, research-driven environment with evolving models, data, and tools.

What We Offer

• Meaningful time off to rest and recharge: 23 days of annual leave (accrued), separate sick leave, and paid bank holidays and company holidays.
• Fully funded private healthcare for UK employees, with broad provider access, virtual and in‐person care, and strong mental health and serious illness support.
• Pension scheme with a total 8% contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings.
• Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in‐office.
• Collaboration with top‐tier engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics.
• Freedom to influence the product and own key initiatives.