Job title: Lead, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) / Behaviour Learning
Job type: Permanent
Emp type: Full-time
Salary type: Annual
Salary: GBP £200,000.00
Location: London, UK
Job published: 2025-09-01
Job ID: 46133
Contact name: Mark Ainscough
Phone number: +447867123907
Contact email: mark.ainscough@kensingtonconsulting.co.uk

Job Description

Job Title:  Lead Vision Language Action

Location: London, UK

Salary: $100K

This company is pioneering the development of the world’s most advanced, reliable, commercially scalable, and safe humanoid robots. Their first humanoid platform, HMND 01, is a next-generation labour automation unit designed to deliver highly efficient services across multiple domains, starting with industrial applications.

What You’ll Do

  • Define and execute the strategy for representation learning, behaviour cloning, and reinforcement learning (RL).

  • Lead large-scale post-training of multi-modal LLM / VLM / VLA systems, integrating new sensor modalities such as vision, audio, proprioception, LiDAR, and point clouds.

  • Build continuous pipelines that gather simulation and tele-operation logs, maintain a versioned data lake, transform and label data streams with weak supervision, curate balanced datasets, and run evaluation loops that feed new failure cases back into training.

  • Collaborate with MLOps and Data Platform teams to scale distributed training and optimise models for real-time edge deployment.

  • Recruit, mentor, and support a small, high-performing team of research scientists and engineers.

We’re Looking For

  • 6+ years of experience building deep-learning systems, with 2+ years in technical leadership roles.

  • Hands-on expertise with LLM / VLM architecture design, billion-parameter training, and fine-tuning.

  • Strong background in robotics, autonomous driving, or large language models, with applied experience in behaviour cloning, actor–critic methods, or offline RL.

Nice to Have

  • Deployment experience on humanoid or legged robots.

  • Proven record of shipping to real robots or vehicles and iterating via data-flywheel loops.

  • Experience in autonomous vehicle control and planning.

  • Research contributions or open-source work in multi-modal transformers, diffusion control, or world models.

  • Familiarity with open-source VLA frameworks such as OpenVLA or Physical Intelligence (π) models.

What’s on Offer

  • Competitive salary with participation in a Stock Option Plan.

  • Paid vacation aligned with local labour laws.

  • Travel opportunities to international offices.

  • Office perks: free breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and regular team events.

  • Autonomy to shape the product and lead key initiatives.

  • Collaboration with world-class engineers, researchers, and product experts in AI and robotics.

  • A startup culture built on speed, transparency, and minimal bureaucracy.