Head of AI (hands-on)

VC-backed Robotics Startup | London (on-site, with flexibility)

Compensation: Up to £220k + equity package

About

This is a VC-backed robotics company building the intelligence layer for industrial machines — forklifts, cranes, excavators and other heavy equipment. The approach is pragmatic: start with remote teleoperation to generate real-world operator data at scale, then train Vision-Language-Action models toward increasing autonomy.

The teleoperation system is live and generating data. The autonomy stack is being built on top of it now. The near-term approach is imitation learning on open VLA foundations, adapted to proprietary operator data. RL follows once the baseline is proven.

This is a founding hire to lead the research efforts, working alongside the CTO and CEO — setting technical direction, owning the model stack, and hiring a team of 6–7 over the coming mont...