Humanoid

Reinforcement Learning Engineer - Manipulation 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're hiring a Reinforcement Learning Engineer to join our Autonomy team based in London. In this role you will leverage reinforcement learning in both simulation and physical reality to build highly performant and robust manipulation policies.

What You'll Do

  • Train language-vision conditioned manipulation policies via reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation and in the real world.
  • Construct challenging and diverse suites of manipulation tasks in simulation.
  • Partner with teleoperations to collect trajectories in simulation for behavior cloning.
  • Partner with testing and operations to establish real-world RL training pipelines.
  • Experiment with various ways of bringing policies trained in simulation to the real world.

What We're Looking For

  • 3+ years building deep‑learning systems (industry or research) with shipped models or published artifacts to show for it.
  • Hands‑on with at least one of: LLMs, VLMs, or image/video generative models — architecture, training, and inference.
  • Experience solving real problems using reinforcement learning with deep neural networks in any domain.
  • Strong Python + PyTorch/JAX; you can profile, debug numerics, and write maintainable research code.
  • You are self-driven, pro-active, communicate efficiently, document experiments clearly and communicate trade‑offs crisply.

Nice to have

  • Experience with simulators for robotics (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo etc.)
  • Experience in RL for robotics.
  • Experience building infrastructure for large-scale RL (e.g. using ray).
  • Publications at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPS or equivalent open‑source contributions.
  • Familiarity with OpenVLA, Physical Intelligence (π) models, or similar open 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.

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