VP of Industrial Engineering

Thehumanoid; Greater London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Thehumanoid in London is seeking a VP of Industrial Engineering to lead engineering delivery across hardware, software, and AI for industrial applications. This role requires a strong software background and deep understanding of the industrial market.

As the key engineering owner, you will ensure product alignment with customer needs and timelines. You will also foster collaboration across teams to enhance operational readiness and product scaling.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in engineering leadership.
• Software-biased background with hardware and AI fluency.
• Deep understanding of the industrial market.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end engineering delivery for the industrial product.
• Direct prioritization for engineers dedicated to industrial.
• Build a delivery engine that releases production software.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Software development

AI and system integration

Industrial market understanding

Job description

Here at Humanoid, we believe in a future where robots amplify human potential. That’s why we’ve set out on a mission to build the world’s most capable, commercially-scalable, and safe humanoid robots. We’re bringing that mission to life with HMND‑01 Alpha - our rapidly developed humanoid platform now running in real industrial pilots - and we’re growing the team to take it even further.

VP of Industrial Engineering

Humanoid · London · Reports to CTO

About Humanoid

We're building the first commercially deployed humanoid robots for industrial environments. Our wheeled industrial robot is in active customer pilots today — Schaeffler, Bosch, Siemens and others publicly named — with the first beta fleet shipping in 2026 and production scaling over the years that follow.

Our engineering leadership comes from Boston Dynamics, Amazon Robotics, Brain Corp, Sanctuary AI, Yandex Self-Driving, Nebius, Cloudflare, and Google. Between us, the team has collectively deployed hundreds of thousands of robots into real-world operation. We are well-capitalized with significant runway, and run one of the densest concentrations of robotics and AI talent across Europe, the US, and Canada. Offices in London (HQ), Vancouver, Boston, and San Diego.

Why this bet

Most humanoid efforts are racing toward fully general-purpose bipeds with five-fingered hands. We made a different call — informed by direct customer conversations and a team that has actually deployed robots at fleet scale in prior companies. Our wedge is the practical one: wheeled industrial humanoids that solve real customer problems today, on a generalized hardware platform with generalized learning paradigms.

What that means for the role: The combination of generalized hardware and generalized learning lets us deploy and integrate astonishingly fast — high-performance capability landing in customer facilities in days to weeks, not quarters. Industrial customers used to the multi-quarter integration cycles that are the industry norm consistently tell us this looks different. It is.

How we think about AI

The AI stack is our long-term flywheel. We are aggressively pushing the envelope on modern robot learning — fleet learning, embodied agents, foundation models for autonomy — and leveraging AI agents across the product workflow itself. The platform is generalized enough that a capability trained once propagates across every robot in the field. Our public AI white paper has more: https://thehumanoid.ai/ai/

The role

You will be the single engineering owner of industrial product delivery — the person who, across hardware, software, AI, and system integration, makes sure what we ship is what our customers actually need, in the order they need it, on the timeline they need it.

You won't run a siloed sub-org. You will work as a peer to our functional engineering leaders — hardware, software, AI, test — leading prioritization for engineers dedicated to the industrial product. Think of this as a technical GM for industrial: you own what and when; you partner with functional leads who own how.

This role reports directly to the CTO.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end engineering delivery for the industrial product — from design, through pilots, through scale and iteration in the field — across HW, SW, AI, and system integration & test.

• Direct prioritization for the engineers hard-allocated to industrial across our matrixed functions (industrial / common / home). Partner closely with functional leads on shared platform work, and with Ops on manufacturing readiness.

• Be the single source of truth on industrial engineering delivery and forward roadmap for the CEO, Commercial team, Product, and customers.

• Build a delivery engine that releases production software on a fast, predictable cadence and that scales beyond the first industrial product line.

What you bring

• 15+ years in engineering leadership, with a track record of shipping multi-disciplinary HW/SW/AI products at meaningful scale.

• Software-biased background. Most of the long-term work here is software and AI — deployment, fleet learning, capability iteration. We need a leader whose center of gravity is software, with the HW and AI fluency to drive us to a world-class holistic product.

• Deep understanding of the industrial market — what real industrial customers in logistics, manufacturing, automotive and adjacent verticals actually buy, integrate, and rely on. UK or EU industrial experience is a strong plus; US industrial deployment experience is equally valued.

• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in a matrix — you have driven outcomes across teams you didn’t directly manage, and you can show how.

• You have taken product from zero to one, and have delighted customers with innovative solutions to solve their real pain points.

• Deep technical credibility across HW, SW, and modern AI — enough to debate functional leads as a peer, not just review their work.

• Comfort operating across distributed teams (London, Boston, Vancouver, San Diego).

• Calibrated for the pace of a company moving from prototype to production at the same time it’s raising and growing.

What success looks like at 12 months

• Long term pilots transition smoothly into scaled deployments at multiple customer locations.

• Robots in reliable operation around the clock, delivering to strict SLAs.

• HW, SW, and AI are all moving at best-in-class quality — none of the three is sacrificed to hit a near-term gate.

Location

London required. The role requires daily proximity to the people you’ll be coordinating with across engineering/ops/product/business.