Reinforcement Learning Engineer - Manipulation
About this role
Here at Humanoid, we believe in a future where robots amplify human potential. That’s why we’ve set out on a mission to build the world’s most capable, commercially-scalable, and safe humanoid robots. We’re bringing that mission to life with HMND‑01 Alpha - our rapidly developed humanoid platform now running in real industrial pilots - and we’re growing the team to take it even further.
About the Role
We're hiring a Reinforcement Learning Engineer to join our Autonomy team based in London. In this role you will leverage reinforcement learning in both simulation and physical reality to build highly performant and robust manipulation policies.
What You'll Do
Train language-vision conditioned manipulation policies via reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation and in the real world.
Construct challenging and diverse suites of manipulation tasks in simulation.
Partner with teleoperations to collect trajectories in simulation for behavior cloning.
Partner with testing and operations to establish real-world RL training pipelines.
Experiment with various ways of bringing policies trained in simulation to the real world.
What We're Looking For
3+ years building deep‑learning systems (industry or research) with shipped models or published artifacts to show for it.
Hands‑on with at least one of: LLMs, VLMs, or image/video generative models — architecture, training, and inference.
Experience solving real problems using reinforcement learning with deep neural networks in any domain.
Strong Python + PyTorch/JAX; you can profile, debug numerics, and write maintainable research code.
You are self-driven, pro-active, communicate efficiently, document experiments clearly and communicate trade‑offs crisply.
Nice to have
Experience with simulators for robotics (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo etc.)
Experience in RL for robotics.
Experience building infrastructure for large-scale RL (e.g. using ray).
Publications at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS or equivalent open‑source contributions.
Familiarity with OpenVLA, Physical Intelligence (π) models, or similar open VLA frameworks.
What We Offer
Competitive equity: stock options with meaningful upside as we scale.
30+ paid days off, including 23 days of annual leave, all UK bank holidays, and additional company closure days (including Christmas–New Year shutdown).
Private healthcare, including virtual and in-person care.
Pension scheme with 8% total contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings.
Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in-office.
Work at the frontier - collaborate daily with world-class engineers, researchers, and product experts building the next generation of AI and humanoid robotics.
Real ownership - direct access to founding leadership, meaningful input on product direction, and the ability to drive key initiatives from day one.
Company at a glance
In a world where artificial intelligence opens up new horizons, our faith in its potential unveils a new outlook where, together, humans and machines build a new future filled with knowledge, inspiration, and incredible discoveries.
The development of a functional humanoid robot underpins an era of abundance and well-being where poverty will disappear, and people will be able to choose what they want to do.
We can imagine millions of bipedal robots doing more work than all human labour does today freeing people from the servitude of some repetitive and boring tasks that nobody likes to perform.
We believe that we have enough abundance to take care of everyone who is displaced. Eventually, providing a universal basic income will lead to the true evolution of our civilization.
Labor shortages loom, as the demands on our built environment rise. With the world’s workforce increasingly moving away from undesirable tasks, the manufacturing, construction, and logistics industries critical to our daily lives are left exposed.
By deploying our general-purpose humanoid robots in environments deemed hazardous or monotonous, we envision a future where human well-being is safeguarded while closing the gaps in critical global labour needs.
Top Benefits
- Stock Options
- 30+ Paid Days Off
- Private Healthcare
- Pension Scheme
- Free Daily Breakfast
- Catered Lunch
- Snacks In-office
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