Senior VLA Pre-training Engineer

We're hiring for a team building the brain of the next generation of industrial humanoid robots.

🔬 The Project Our client is a fast-growing humanoid robotics startup building robots for real industrial environments: manufacturing, logistics, warehouses, large-scale physical operations. Not research-only - they already have 30,000 pre-orders globally, signed contracts with a major European industrial manufacturer and successful pilots with global engineering leaders in automotive and industrial automation.

The VLA (Vision-Language-Action) team is responsible for the core intelligence: how the robot perceives the world, understands instructions, learns new skills, and executes manipulation tasks autonomously.

🧠 Your Role As a Senior VLA Pre-training Engineer, you'll own the full lifecycle of foundation models for robotic behavior:

• Pre-training and fine-tuning VLA models on large-scale multimodal datasets;
• Building and maintaining data pipelines: collection, curation, synthetic data generation;
• Designing distributed training infrastructure;
• Sim-to-real transfer: validating policies in simulation before real-world deployment;
• Working closely with simulation engineers, data scientists, and embedded teams;
• Shipping models that directly power real robots in production.

🛠 What We're Looking For

• 5+ years building deep learning systems (industry or research) with shipped models or published work;
• Hands-on with LLMs, VLMs, or VLA models - architecture, training, fine-tuning;
• Large-scale distributed training: PyTorch DDP, data pipelines, checkpointing;
• Experience with robotics simulators (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Gazebo) or real robotic systems;
• Strong Python + PyTorch/JAX; you can debug numerics and write production code;
• Self-driven, proactive, communicates clearly.

Nice to have: Robotics background, sim-to-real experience, OpenVLA or similar VLA frameworks

💰 What's Offered Compensation: £150,000 – £230,000 gross/year, based on experience London, 100% onsite - daily access to robots, labs, and prototypes Relocation support: up to £8,000 + Skilled Worker Visa sponsorship Benefits: private healthcare, pension (8%), 23 days PTO, equity

📩 Interested? DM recruiter contact with 3–5 lines about your VLA/LLM pre-training experience, distributed training scale, and robotics background. We move fast.