Senior ML Engineer (VLA & Navigation) (London)

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 Senior ML Engineer (VLA & Navigation) (London) to join our Perception and Navigation team based in London. In this role you will lead the design, development, and optimization of cutting-edge computer vision and spatial understanding systems, including object detection, semantic segmentation, 3D scene reconstruction, and persistent geometric reasoning.

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.