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Senior Robot Learning Engineer

Job in Newtownards, County Down, BT22, Northern Ireland, UK
Listing for: Wave Recruitment
Full Time position
Listed on 2026-05-31
Job specializations:
  • Engineering
    Systems Engineer, Robotics
Job Description & How to Apply Below

The Role

You will architect, train, and deploy end-to-end large behaviour models for bi-manual and mobile manipulation, and lead the maturing of the early-stage RL pipeline.

This robot learning role is with a seriously exciting scale up. The platform is mature, the data is flowing, and the team is ready to scale its most promising research directions into production-grade manipulation policies. They need someone to lead the development and deployment of large behaviour models, taking diffusion transformers, VLAs, and language-conditioned policies from the literature onto a real bi-manual humanoid.

This is not a research-only role. You''ll inherit a mature policy training codebase, a VR teleoperation pipeline producing high-frequency multi-modal data, and a Gymnasium environment wrapping a real robot. The work you ship runs on hardware.

Key responsibilities

  • Architect, train, and evaluate end-to-end large behaviour models for bi-manual and mobile manipulation
  • Advance diffusion transformer policies, mature VLA integration, and develop language conditioning for true multi-task generalisation
  • Apply RL to refine pre-trained policies: RL token fine-tuning, residual RL, off-policy RL with reference-action regularisation, RL-based fine-tuning of diffusion policies
  • Build a systematic sim-to-real transfer pipeline, connecting existing simulation infrastructure to training
  • Deploy and iterate learned policies on physical robot hardware
  • Mentor junior researchers and engineers, and publish at top-tier venues
What We're Looking For
  • PhD/MSc in ML, Robotics, CS, or related field with 4+ years of equivalent industry research experience
  • Demonstrated expertise training and deploying learned manipulation policies on real robots
  • Strong background in at least two of: behaviour cloning, diffusion policies, VLA/VLM architectures, RL for manipulation
  • PyTorch and large-scale (multi-GPU, distributed) training
  • Track record of publications at top-tier venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), or equivalent demonstrated research impact through deployed systems, patents, or significant open-source contributions
  • Strong Python; production-quality research code with proper testing, type hints, and documentation

Useful

  • Hands-on experience with humanoid or bi-manual manipulation platforms
  • Diffusion transformer, ACT, or VLA architectures specifically
  • Pre-trained vision/language models for robot control (CLIP, DINOv2, Pali Gemma)
  • Mu Jo Co , Isaac Sim, or Mani Skill for sim-to-real policy training
  • RL fine-tuning of pre-trained policies (residual RL, DPPO, or similar)
  • 3D perception for policy conditioning (point clouds, keypoints, NeRFs)
Key contribution areas
  • End-to-end large behaviour models for bi-manual and mobile manipulation
  • Scale and evolve diffusion transformer policies, VLA integration, and language conditioning
  • Extend the imitation learning pipeline to leverage growing teleoperation datasets
  • Apply RL to push beyond what imitation alone can reach
  • Target sub-millimetre precision and contact-rich manipulation
  • Develop policies that generalise across tasks, object categories, and environments
  • Move from single-task to multi-task and task-conditioned architectures
  • Design hierarchical behaviour systems for long-horizon manipulation
  • Drive systematic ablations across architectures
  • Build the sim-to-real transfer pipeline: domain randomisation, rendering augmentation, sim-to-real benchmarking
  • Deploy and iterate learned policies on physical robot hardware
  • Extend the Gymnasium environment wrapper and integrate with the robot's control stack
  • Leverage perception team outputs (keypoints, learned features, 3D point clouds) for policy conditioning
  • Research Leadership
    • Track the literature and bring relevant advances back to the team
    • Identify and propose new research directions aligned with the manipulation roadmap
    • Mentor junior researchers and engineers
    • Publish at top-tier venues — conference attendance and open-source contributions are actively supported
    What's On Offer
    • Join a team with world class applied research scientists, ML engineers, and robotics software engineers
    • A mature platform that ships to physical hardware, not slides
    • Active support for conference attendance and open-source contributions
    • Competitive compensation

    Apply or send your CV to —

#J-18808-Ljbffr
Position Requirements
10+ Years work experience
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