Reinforcement Learning Engineer - Manipulation

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.