{"id":91908,"url":"https://alion.io/job/humanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning","title":"VLA Pre-training Engineer - Deep Learning","company":{"id":35230,"name":"Humanoid","domain":"thehumanoid.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/thehumanoid","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":77,"open_postings":11,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.909,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":56,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"OpenVLA","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-16T08:55:09Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T13:14:40Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":92,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":92},"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 - our rapidly developed humanoid platform being deployed in real industrial environments - and we’re growing the team to take it even further.\nAbout the Role\nWe're hiring a VLA Pre-training Engineer to join our Autonomy team based in London. In this role you will you will work on all aspects of training capable policies, be it pre-training of a base model on a diverse multi-embodiment corpus of trajectories, fine-tuning a policy to perform a specific task well, curating data collection processes or exploring productive ways to generate and use synthetic data. This is primarily a deep learning-focused role, so we are looking for experience solving real problems using modern neural networks, while experience in robotics isn’t strictly required. However if you don’t have such experience, be prepared that you’d need to familiarize yourself with a new domain quickly.\nWhat You'll Do\nPost-train policies via behaviour cloning and RL; own the full loop from data to deployment.\n\nPartner with the Data Collection team to drive collecting new data: specify what good data looks like, identify failure modes, ensure diversity and coverage.\n\nWork closely with external partners to ensure steady supply of high-quality pretraining-scale data.\n\nRun pre-/mid-/post-training on VLA stack; explore new modalities and architecture changes.\n\nBuild and maintain continuous pipelines: ingest synthetic data and teleop logs, version them, apply weak-supervision labelling, curate balanced datasets, and auto-surface fresh failure cases into retraining.\n\nWork with MLOps & Data Platform teams to scale distributed training and optimize models for real-time edge inference.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\n3+ years building deep-learning systems (industry or research) with shipped models or published artifacts to show for it.\n\nDeep hands-on experience with at least one of: LLMs, VLMs, or image/video generative models - architecture, training, and inference.\n\nExperience with deep learning infrastructure: streaming datasets, checkpointing & state management, distributed training strategies.\n\nStrong Python + PyTorch/JAX; you can profile, debug numerics, and write maintainable research code.\n\nFamiliarity with modern software engineering practices.\n\nYou document experiments clearly and communicate trade-offs crisply.\n\nNice to have\nRobotics or autonomous driving experience.\n\nExperience applying RL to LLMs or robotics.\n\nExperience with VLA (vision-language-action) models.\n\nProven productization of deep nets (latency/throughput constraints, telemetry, on-device optimization).\n\nPublications at top-tier deep learning conferences or equivalent open-source contributions.\n\nFamiliarity with OpenVLA, Physical Intelligence (π) models, or similar open source VLA frameworks.\n\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive equity: stock options with meaningful upside as we scale.\n\n30+ paid days off, including 23 days of annual leave, all UK bank holidays, and additional company closure days (including Christmas-New Year shutdown).\n\nPrivate healthcare, including virtual and in-person care.\n\nPension scheme with 8% total contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings.\n\nFree daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in-office.\n\nWork at the frontier - collaborate daily with world-class engineers, researchers, and product experts building the next generation of AI and humanoid robotics.\n\nReal ownership - direct access to founding leadership, meaningful input on product direction, and the ability to drive key initiatives from day one.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3765,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Annual leave","Equity","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics AI","Logistics & Warehouse Robotics","Industrial Robotics","Humanoid Robots"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-16T08:55:09Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":17,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.463,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":91,"expected_fill_days":56,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/humanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/humanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T16:48:33Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1324,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":35230},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=35230"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhumanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhumanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhumanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/humanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhumanoid-vla-pre-training-engineer-deep-learning"}]}