Senior ML Engineer (VLA & Navigation)

Humanoid
London, United Kingdom
Last month
Job Type
Permanent
Work Location
On-site
Seniority
Senior
Posted
22 Apr 2026 (Last month)

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 aSenior ML Engineer 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.

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