Staff Robotics Control Engineer - Whole-Body Control (Wheeled Platform)

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.

We are looking for a Staff Robotics Control Engineer to join our Control Team in London and lead the evolution of whole-body control for our Wheeled Alpha platform - a humanoid whose whole body spans a wheeled base, torso and two arms, controlled as one coordinated system.

We need genuine depth in classical whole-body control. You should know hierarchical and weighted QP formulations from the inside - not as a library you have called, but as something you have derived, implemented, tuned, profiled and debugged on real hardware under demo pressure. You should have opinions about strict hierarchies versus soft-weighted stacks, regularisation and nullspace behaviour, what to do when a task set becomes infeasible, and how to keep a redundant system clear of singularities without it feeling sluggish. Alongside that depth, you will set technical direction and mentor a strong team of control engineers.

Whole-Body Control Architecture & Algorithms:

• Lead the evolution of the Wheeled Alpha whole-body controller: task formulation, prioritisation, weighting, constraint handling and solver selection.

• Coordinate wheeled base, torso and dual-arm motion within a single whole-body formulation, with base motion that tracks commanded targets accurately and stays well-behaved under aggressive commands and long-duration operation.

• Own the constraint layer - self-collision avoidance, joint and velocity limit guarding, and singularity handling - plus feasibility handling and recovery when the solver fails.

• Drive the evolution toward predictive formulations: evaluate and develop MPC-based whole-body control where anticipating dynamics and constraints outperforms instantaneous QP resolution.

Dynamics, Compliance & Payload:

• Own the dynamic models the controller runs on - inertial, gravity and friction modelling, system identification, and online payload estimation - so the robot knows what it is carrying and controls accordingly.

• Advance compliance and force behaviour - impedance, admittance and force control that stays compliant at contact - and extend payload capability without sacrificing either.

• Own stability-aware behaviour under changing payload and dynamic motion

Safety Integration:

• Make whole-body control a first-class citizen of the safety architecture: the controller must accept and honour requests from dedicated safety compute - velocity capping, controlled deceleration, constrained operating envelopes - provably and without degrading motion quality.

• Co-own the controls-to-safety interface with the safety team, and design control behaviour so that safety interventions are graceful rather than abrupt.

Technical Leadership:

• Define the performance metrics for whole-body control and insist on deterministic, reproducible evaluation of every change, in simulation and on hardware.

• Mentor control engineers on optimisation-based control, numerical robustness and hardware debugging; act as reviewer of record for the most consequential changes.

• Work with hardware teams so control constraints and mechanical design decisions stay coherent.

• Deep, demonstrable expertise in optimisation-based whole-body control: hierarchical and weighted QP formulations, task prioritisation, constraint handling, and the numerical realities of solving them inside a real-time loop.

• Strong command of the classical WBC toolkit - operational space and task-space control, inverse dynamics and IK formulations, redundancy resolution, nullspace projection, impedance and admittance control, contact and force control - and working knowledge of MPC formulations for whole-body or mobile-manipulation control.

• Deployed whole-body controllers on real high-DoF hardware (humanoids, mobile manipulators, dual-arm or legged platforms), including coordinating base and manipulator motion.

• Practical fluency with QP/NLP solvers and their failure modes: conditioning, infeasibility, warm starting, solve-time budgets, and what to do at the limit.

• Strong dynamic modelling foundations: rigid body kinematics/dynamics (Jacobians, dynamics formulations, URDF-based modelling), inertial and friction system identification, and payload/external-load estimation.

• Expert modern C++ for real-time control with Python for analysis and prototyping.

• Track record of taking control algorithms to production reliability rather than to a paper or a one-off demo, plus demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring.

• 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.