Humanoid

Reinforcement Learning Engineer - Locomanipulation at Humanoid (London, United Kingdom)

Humanoid· London, United Kingdom·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

Humanoid at a glance

Humanoid builds commercially scalable, safe humanoid robots to automate labor-intensive industrial tasks in warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing.

Designs and builds general-purpose humanoid robots (the HMND 01 platform) that automate physical industrial tasks like goods handling, picking and packing, and kitting, orchestrated by an in-house AI fleet framework called KinetIQ.

Approximately $30M self-funded by founder Artem Sokolov; a ~$200M Series A was in talks as of early 2026 (not closed) raised · latest: Series A (in talks, ~$200M, no valuation set) as of February 2026 · backed by Artem Sokolov (founder, sole shareholder)

Job description

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 - our rapidly developed humanoid platform being deployed in real industrial environments - and we’re growing the team to take it even further.

About The Role

We are looking for a Senior or Staff Reinforcement Learning Engineer to develop learning-based control policies for humanoid robots. You will design and train reinforcement learning policies that enable dynamic locomotion and loco-manipulation behaviors on real robots. Your work will focus on building scalable training pipelines, designing reward functions and environments, and improving sim-to-real transfer for reliable deployment on hardware. You will work closely with controls and robotics engineers to integrate learned policies into the robot control stack, ensuring stable and robust behavior in real-world conditions. Development will involve continuous iteration between large-scale simulation and hardware experiments. The problems you will work on include dynamic locomotion, balance recovery, contact-rich manipulation, and multi-behavior policy learning.

What You’ll Do

  • Design and train reinforcement learning policies for humanoid robot control.
  • Build scalable simulation and training pipelines (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo).
  • Design reward functions, observation spaces, and curricula for complex behaviors.
  • Improve robustness and sim-to-real transfer of learned policies.
  • Deploy and evaluate policies on real robotic systems.
  • Integrate policies into the control stack.

What We're Looking For

  • MS or PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related field.
  • Strong experience with reinforcement learning (e.g., PPO, SAC, offline RL).
  • Experience applying RL to robotics or physical systems.
  • Experience deploying learned policies on real robotic systems.
  • Experience with physics-based simulation environments (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo).
  • Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++.

Nice to have:

  • Experience with RL for locomotion or legged robots.
  • Experience with sim-to-real transfer.
  • Familiarity with robot dynamics, control, or whole-body control.

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.

Why work at Humanoid

  • High-growth environment: Company grew headcount by 139% in a single year, indicating rapid scaling and opportunity for career advancement. 65+ open roles suggest strong hiring momentum.
  • Talent from top robotics firms: Team includes alumni from Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, Dyson, Ocado Technology, Arrival, Wayve, and others — offering a deep learning and collaboration environment.
  • Technical focus: Engineering and technical roles represent 38% of the workforce, with senior-level hires at 23% of the team. The company emphasizes hardware, AI, machine learning, and control systems.
  • Mission-driven: Clear purpose to automate undesirable, unsafe, and repetitive work — appealing to candidates who want to make a tangible societal impact.
  • Global presence: Offices in London (HQ), Cambridge (USA), and Burnaby (Canada), plus operations in 16 countries — offering potential for international mobility and remote collaboration.
  • Innovation culture: Described as a place where engineers and researchers “move from demo to deployment” and “not just in the lab.” The CTO emphasizes building systems that perform in the real world from day one.
  • Office/Hybrid policy: Not explicitly stated, but the company has physical offices in three countries and a distributed team across 16 nations — likely supports hybrid/remote with in-office collaboration for engineering roles.

Application questions