Founding ML Scientist - Physical AI & Robotics

Understanding Recruitment; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

Job summary

Understanding Recruitment is seeking a Founding Research Scientist for a UK startup building models that enable robots to understand, learn, and act in the real world. The role focuses on robot learning, vision-language-action models and world models, with real robotic experiments and substantial research ownership.

You will lead research efforts, develop new architectures and data strategies, and help define the company’s long-term research direction while publishing impactful results.

Qualifications

• Strong research background in ML, robotics or computer vision.
• Deep understanding of modern deep learning.
• Experience training and evaluating ML models.
• Excellent mathematical and experimental instincts.
• Ability to form hypotheses and design rigorous experiments.
• Curiosity for genuinely unsolved research problems.

Responsibilities

• Lead research across robot learning, VLAs and world models.
• Develop new model architectures, training methods and data strategies.
• Explore how models can generalise across tasks, environments and embodiments.
• Take ideas from papers and first principles to real-world robotic experiments.
• Help define the company’s long-term research direction.
• Publish meaningful research.

Skills

Strong research background in ML,Rob@t

Deep understanding of modern deep学习

Experience training and evaluating ML

Excellent mathematical and empirical

Ability to form hypotheses and design

Curiosity for unsolved research

Job description

Understanding Recruitment is seeking a Founding Research Scientist for a UK startup building models that enable robots to understand, learn, and act in the real world. The role focuses on robot learning, vision-language-action models and world models, with real robotic experiments and substantial research ownership.

You will lead research efforts, develop new architectures and data strategies, and help define the company’s long-term research direction while publishing impactful results.