- Location
- London, London
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Seniority
- Lead
- Education
- PhD
- Source
- RecruiterFlow
Description
Principal or Senior Physical AI Engineer
About the Company
Early conversations on behalf of a profitable, independent, deep-tech robotics company in London with thirty years of engineering depth behind it, not a six-month-old company running on funding alone.
About the Role
Nothing is live yet. This is genuine market mapping before a role gets built, and I'd love to hear from people who might be a fit whether or not the timing works for you right now.
No pitch, no locked-in vacancy details, just understanding what's out there and what would genuinely move someone.
What this is
- Real, hands-on production experience in reinforcement learning for manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and domain randomisation for contact-rich tasks. Academic exposure alone isn't enough.
- Trained models that actually control a physical robot, not just software.
- Taken something that works in simulation and made it survive contact with the real world.
- Comfortable owning a technical direction and turning it into an actual engineering plan, and bringing a team with you.
What this isn't
- General AI, ML engineering, LLMs or chatbots. Genuinely valuable work, just not this.
- A search for someone who's already shipped a finished physical AI product at scale. Almost nobody has, at this stage of the field, and that's fine.
Nice to have
A PhD or years in robotics, RL or controls is a plus, but not a gate. If your track record speaks for itself, that's what counts.
Basis
Full-time and part-time or fractional arrangements both genuinely being considered, so don't rule yourself out on that basis alone.
(You may see a version of this appear as either Senior or Principal, depending on the calibre of person we find. Same conversation either way.)