Research Scientist

🚀 Founding Research Scientist | Physical AI | London

💰 £80–160k base salary + equity

I’m partnering with a venture-backed Physical AI startup building models that enable robots to learn and act in the real world. They’re hiring their first Research Scientist to shape the research direction and help build a lab from its earliest days.

You’ll have robots on your desk, fast training and evaluation loops, and ownership of experiments from initial idea through to deployment on real hardware.

What you’ll work on:

• VLA and world-model post-training, progressing towards pretraining from scratch.

• Cross-embodiment transfer: getting one model to work across multiple robot bodies.

• Data strategy, evaluation on physical robots, and publishing technical reports and papers.

• VLM orchestration for robotic perception, reasoning and action.

Who could be a fit?

PhD students, postdocs or industry researchers with experience in robot learning, imitation learning, VLAs, world models, manipulation or perception. Strong ML researchers looking to move into robotics are also welcome.

Particularly interested in people with experience across:

• Unitree G1 robots and deploying learned policies on physical hardware.

• NVIDIA Isaac Sim for simulation, evaluation and sim-to-real workflows.

• VLM orchestration within robotics systems.

Publications at CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS or NeurIPS, benchmark experience, or contributions to LeRobot, openpi or Isaac would be a bonus.

📍 Bermondsey, London — fully onsite

💰 £80–160k base salary + equity

🔬 Founding research ownership and equity

Interested? Please apply or email me at khorsley@acceler8talent.com