Simulation Engineer - Manipulation

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. # **About The Role** We're hiring a **Senior Simulation Engineer** to join our VLA team based in London. In this role, you will build and maintain simulation environments for dexterous manipulation tasks across industrial, service, and home domains. This is primarily a simulation and reinforcement learning-focused role, so we are looking for experience creating realistic physics-based environments and training RL policies, 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. # **What You’ll Do** - Design and implement gym environments for manipulation tasks spanning industrial, service, and home settings, defining appropriate observation spaces, action spaces, and reward functions. - Analyze and address reward hacking - identify cases where learned policies exploit reward misspecification and iterate on reward design to produce robust behaviors. - Analyze and reduce the sim-to-real gap by tuning physics parameters, improving asset fidelity, and validating simulation behavior against real-world data. - Work with third-party vendors to procure, validate, and integrate high-quality 3D assets (objects, fixtures, environments) suitable for physics-based simulation. - Ensure correct physics setup - contact dynamics, friction, mass properties, joint limits - so that trained policies transfer reliably to hardware. - Identify and reduce simulation bottlenecks to maximize training throughput and environment step rates. - Improve our simulation-based evaluation and reinforcement learning infrastructure to support rapid iteration and scaling. # **What We're Looking For** - 3+ years building simulation environments or game-engine-based interactive systems (industry or research) with shipped products, published results, or equivalent artifacts to show for it. - Deep hands-on experience with at least one physics simulator (Isaac Sim/IsaacLab, MuJoCo, PyBullet, Drake) or equivalent game engine experience (Unreal, Unity) with a focus on physically accurate interactions. - Strong practical experience running large-scale parallel simulation on GPU clusters and good familiarity with modern GPU-accelerated simulation infrastructure. - Strong Python; you can profile bottlenecks, debug physics issues, and write maintainable research code. - Familiarity with modern software engineering practices. - You document experiments clearly and communicate trade-offs crisply. *Nice to have:* - Robotics or manipulation-specific experience (grasping, contact-rich tasks, deformable objects). - Experience designing reward functions and training RL policies in simulated environments; solid understanding of common failure modes (reward hacking, distribution shift, sim-to-real gap). - Experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim & IsaacLab specifically. - Experience with domain randomization, system identification, or other sim-to-real transfer techniques. - Publications at top-tier robotics or RL conferences or equivalent open-source contributions. - Familiarity with robocasa, robosuite or similar open-source manipulation simulation frameworks. # **What We Offer** - Competitive equity: stock options with meaningful upside as we scale. - 30+ paid days off, including 23 days of annual leave, all UK bank holidays, and additional company closure days (including Christmas–New Year shutdown). - Private healthcare, including virtual and in-person care. - Pension scheme with 8% total contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings. - Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in-office. - Work at the frontier - collaborate daily with world-class engineers, researchers, and product experts building the next generation of AI and humanoid robotics. - Real ownership - direct access to founding leadership, meaningful input on product direction, and the ability to drive key initiatives from day one.