Robotics Applied Research Lead

Skills

About the Role

You will set the technical research roadmap for Physical AI, make hands-on model and training decisions, and establish rigorous offline and real-world evaluation. You will define data requirements, move projects through hardware integration and physical testing, investigate failures, and build a focused research and engineering team.

Requirements

• Direct experience making architecture or training decisions for substantial Transformer-based systems
• Physical AI or embodied-system machine-learning experience with real-world deployment or validation
• Python and PyTorch or equivalent framework experience
• Ability to design and debug experiments, inspect failures, and work with large multimodal datasets
• Technical leadership experience, including architecture and resource decisions
• Experience designing held-out tests, controlled comparisons, and evaluation systems
• Computer vision expertise is strongly preferred

Responsibilities

• Define the Physical AI research and engineering roadmap
• Design, adapt, train, and evaluate Transformer-based systems for embodied tasks
• Define data requirements, quality controls, and evaluation datasets
• Establish offline and real-world evaluation systems and release gates
• Move projects through training, hardware integration, and physical testing
• Analyse failures across data, perception, models, control, hardware, and environment
• Recruit and lead a small research and engineering team
• Define safety constraints, supervision, and rollback paths for physical trials
• Communicate technical strategy and convert customer needs into testable requirements

Benefits

• Stock options
• 30+ paid days off, including annual leave, UK bank holidays, and company closure days
• Private healthcare
• Pension scheme with 8% total contribution
• Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks