Senior ML Platform Engineer - Robotics

Senior ML Platform Engineer - Robotics London, Hybrid Contract - Long Term Salary:
Competitive Harnham are working with a growing robotics and AI company that is looking for a Senior ML Platform Engineer to join their team in London. This is a hands-on platform engineering role, focused on owning the software, tooling, web UI, and infrastructure layer used by data operators, ML engineers, and robotics engineers. You will be responsible for building and improving the internal applications and orchestration tooling that support robot data collection, dataset workflows, model training infrastructure, and on-robot deployment.

The Role You will:
* Own and extend internal web applications used for robot data collection, review, QA, and dataset publishing
* Build and maintain FastAPI backends, vanilla JavaScript frontends, CLI tooling, and supporting services
* Improve recording workflows, state machines, config validation, batch processing, stale-data recovery, and archival processes
* Containerise and orchestrate services to ensure reliable deployment across machines and lab environments
* Partner with ML engineers on dataset building, ingestion pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, and high-throughput data workflows
* Work with robotics engineers on ROS2 integration, robot data streams, deployment workflows, and hardware-adjacent platform tooling
* Improve testing, CI, observability, reliability, and performance across concurrent and IO-heavy systems Essential Skills You must have:
* Senior-level software engineering experience, ideally 5 years
* Strong production Python experience
* Experience with typing, async/await, threading, multiprocessing, and concurrent workloads
* FastAPI or another async Python web framework
* Vanilla JavaScript, including DOM manipulation, fetch, and Web Sockets
* Experience building internal tooling, operator tooling, platform tooling, or workflow orchestration systems
* Strong CLI tooling experience, including argparse or Click, config validation, subcommands, and clear error handling
* Docker, CI, automated testing, and reproducible environments
* Strong software engineering fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, networking, memory, IPC, and systems-level thinking
* Experience with high-throughput data pipelines, distributed systems, or performance-sensitive IO workloads
* Experience orchestrating external CLI tools from Python via subprocess, ideally ffmpeg or similar data/media processing tools Nice to Have It would be useful to have:
* Distributed ML training infrastructure experience, such as PyTorch DDP, FSDP, Deep Speed, sharded datasets, streaming readers, or GPU utilisation profiling
* ROS2 experience, including publishers, subscribers, QoS, message types, and topic debugging
* Experience working with physical robot hardware, camera streams, joint states, or latency-sensitive control paths
* OpenCV, Num Py, pandas, PyTorch, JAX, cloud, HPC, or LeRobot dataset format experience
* Experience working closely with ML researchers or robotics engineers in a fast-moving technical environment The Company The company is building advanced robotics and AI systems and is looking for someone who can sit at the intersection of software engineering, ML infrastructure, data tooling, and robotics integration. This is a strong opportunity for a senior engineer who wants real technical ownership and the chance to build the platform layer that supports robotics data collection, model training, and deployment.