VLA Pre-training Engineer - Deep Learning

About the Role

We're hiring a VLA Pre-training Engineer to join our Autonomy team based in London. In this role you will you will work on all aspects of training capable policies, be it pre-training of a base model on a diverse multi-embodiment corpus of trajectories, fine-tuning a policy to perform a specific task well, curating data collection processes or exploring productive ways to generate and use synthetic data. This is primarily a deep learning-focused role, so we are looking for experience solving real problems using modern neural networks, while experience in robotics isn’t strictly required.

However if you don’t have such experience, be prepared that you’d need to familiarize yourself with a new domain quickly.

What You'll Do

• Post-train policies via behaviour cloning and RL; own the full loop from data to deployment.
• Partner with the Data Collection team to drive collecting new data: specify what good data looks like, identify failure modes, ensure diversity and coverage.
• Work closely with external partners to ensure steady supply of high-quality pretraining-scale data.
• Run pre-/mid-/post-training on VLA stack; explore new modalities and architecture changes.
• Build and maintain continuous pipelines: ingest synthetic data and teleop logs, version them, apply weak‑supervision labelling, curate balanced datasets, and auto‑surface fresh failure cases into retraining.
• Work with MLOps & Data Platform teams to scale distributed training and optimize models for real‑time edge inference.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years building deep‑learning systems (industry or research) with shipped models or published artifacts to show for it.
• Deep hands‑on experience with at least one of: LLMs, VLMs, or image/video generative models — architecture, training, and inference.
• Experience with deep learning infrastructure: streaming datasets, checkpointing & state management, distributed training strategies.
• Strong Python + PyTorch/JAX; you can profile, debug numerics, and write maintainable research code.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering practices.
• You document experiments clearly and communicate trade‑offs crisply.

Nice to have

• Robotics or autonomous driving experience.
• Experience applying RL to LLMs or robotics.
• Experience with VLA (vision-language-action) models.
• Proven productization of deep nets (latency/throughput constraints, telemetry, on‑device optimization).
• Publications at top-tier deep learning conferences or equivalent open‑source contributions.
• Familiarity with OpenVLA, Physical Intelligence (π) models, or similar open source 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.