Robotics & Embodied AI

Recruiting the teams behind next-generation robotics and embodied AI platforms

DeepRec.ai partners with leading teams to deliver end-to-end recruitment services across robotics and embodied AI. From humanoid systems to autonomous drones, quadrupeds, and self-driving platforms, we help the innovators pushing embodied intelligence out of simulation and into real-world deployment. 

Talent is scarce and highly specialised. When project success hinges on critical hires in complex environments, teams need a recruitment partner who lives and breathes the deep tech market.

DeepRec.ai's specialised consultants understand the technical nuance, delivery risk, and market dynamics that make hiring in robotics and embodied AI uniquely challenging. 

Whether you're scaling your team or looking for your next career move, our team helps clients and candidates thrive across the full lifecycle of intelligent physical systems: 

Hire exceptional robotics & embodied AI talent: 

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Find a rewarding new role: 

Jobs in Robotics & Embedded AI

Why Choose DeepRec.ai as a Talent Partner? 

A Dedicated Robotics & Embodied AI Division

DeepRec.ai operates through specialist divisions, each focused on a specific area of deep tech. This structure enables us to build deeper relationships with candidates and a strong technical fluency that generalist agencies can't replicate. 

Credibility Through Delivery

We work closely with teams developing and deploying today's most complex systems. Our proximity to the bleeding-edge of real-world robotics gives us a strong understanding of evolving role requirements in a technically constrained market. This is underscored by our client net promoter score (NPS) of +100. 

Responsible Recruitment

As part of Trinnovo Group, DeepRec.ai is B Corp certified, a member of a global community of organisations committed to putting people and the planet before profit. For our clients, this translates into ethical and responsible recruitment practices built on trust, accountability, and long-term impact. 

Community-Driven Recruitment

Much of the most in-demand robotics and autonomy talent is not active on traditional hiring channels. Through sustained engagement with the deep tech ecosystem - including events, collaboration, and industry-led initiatives - DeepRec.ai maintains access to engineers and researchers working on cutting-edge embodied systems. Check out our community page here: https://www.deeprec.ai/community

A Long-Term Talent Partner

We don’t take a transactional approach to hiring. Instead, we work as a long-term talent partner, supporting teams as technologies mature, projects evolve, and organisational needs change.

Our delivery model flexes to match the challenge. From executive search for critical leadership hires, to embedded and retained recruitment for high-volume hiring projects or time-sensitive buildouts, through to permanent and contract hiring across highly specialised roles. This allows us to provide continuity, context, and consistency across multiple hiring cycles, rather than resetting the process each time a new role opens.

Our Robotics Division in Action: MOTOR Ai

Find out how DeepRec.ai supported Germany's autonomous vehicle pioneer, MOTOR Ai, to scale their team with 11 critical hires across geospatial segmentation, perception engineering, reinforcement learning, systems architecture, and more: 

Read the full case study

Robotics and Embodied AI Salary Guides

Interested in working or hiring in the USA's Robotics and Embodied AI market? Explore our latest Robotics salary guides, complete with fresh wage data from our thousands of engagements with candidates and clients around the world:

USA Robotics and Embodied AI Salary Guide

 

European Robotics and Embodied AI Salary Guide

Core Technical Domains

DeepRec.ai works with teams operating across the full embodied stack. Our consultants have the means to help you navigate shifting hiring requirements, whether that's system maturity, deployment context, or risk profile. 

Our core technical domains (areas we specialise in recruiting for) include:

Robotics Platforms & Embodiment

We work with organisations developing physical systems that operate in dynamic environments. This includes research-driven humanoid programmes and logistics platforms designed and deployed at scale: 

  • Humanoid robots

  • Service robots

  • Soft robotics

  • Quadrupeds and bipedal robots

  • Mobile manipulation systems

Learning & Control for Robotics

Hiring in this area requires an understanding of how learned behaviours transfer beyond controlled settings. We recruit specialists working on learning-based control for applications such as autonomous navigation, manipulation, and adaptive behaviour, including:

  • Reinforcement Learning (RL)

  • Imitation & Demonstration Learning

  • Sim-to-Real Transfer

  • End-to-end learning

  • Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for control

  • Policy learning from foundation models

Perception, Vision & Sensor Fusion

Reliable autonomy depends on perception systems that perform under uncertainty. We work with teams hiring for:

  • Object recognition and tracking

  • SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping)

  • 3D vision & depth sensing

  • Tactile and proprioceptive sensing

  • Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic perception

Foundation Models & Generative AI for Physical Systems

As foundation models move into physical domains, hiring demands shift accordingly. We recruit across:

  • Vision-Language Models (VLMs)

  • Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models

  • Diffusion models for motion, grasping & trajectory generation

  • Large-scale robot foundation models

  • World models & predictive simulation

Simulation, Data & Digital Twins

For many robotics programmes, simulation is the primary environment for training, testing, and validation. We work with teams building and relying on:

  • Physics-based simulators

  • Synthetic data generation

  • Digital twins

  • Simulation environments for large-scale robot learning

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) & Collaboration

Systems operating alongside people introduce additional complexity around safety, usability, and trust. We recruit for teams focused on applications such as collaborative manufacturing, assistive robotics, and service environments, including:

  • Collaborative robots (cobots)

  • Gesture, intent & emotion recognition

  • Natural language and multimodal interaction

  • Safety-critical human-in-the-loop systems

Autonomous Systems

We also partner with organisations deploying autonomy at scale, from advanced mobility programmes to industrial automation. This includes teams working on:

  • Self-driving cars

  • Autonomous drones

  • Mobile robots in logistics & industry

Contact DeepRec.ai Directly

Robotics and embodied AI demand a different hiring conversation. The work is interdisciplinary, the timelines are long, and the margin for error is small. We exist to support that reality, bringing context and consistency to one of the most technically demanding talent markets.

Tell us what you're looking for, and we'll connect you with the right consultant as soon as possible: 

Talk to our consultants

MEET THE TEAM

Meet Anthony

Anthony Kelly

Co-Founder & MD EU/UK

Meet Paddy

Paddy Hobson

Team Lead | DACH

Meet Harriet

Harriet Nolan

Recruitment Consultant

Meet Edward

Edward Killin

Principal Recruitment Consultant

Zürich, Switzerland
Reinforcement Learning Engineer
PermanentCHF120000 - CHF150000 per annum
Senior Reinforcement Learning EngineerZurich | Hybrid | Full-timeYou’ve already deployed reinforcement learning on real robots. Now you can apply that experience to autonomous excavators working across different machines, sites and soil conditions. You’ll join a Series A robotics company taking Physical AI into construction, with systems already deployed across multiple countries.You’ll build learning-based planning and control systems that work outside the simulator. That means improving simulation and sim-to-real transfer, designing data pipelines for real-world training, running experiments on physical machines and understanding why behaviour changes when conditions get messy. You’ll also integrate learned components into the wider autonomy stack and help shape how the system moves from prototype into a reliable product.This is a hands-on engineering role for someone with 2–5 years of industry experience in reinforcement learning for control or planning, who has actually deployed systems on physical robots. You’ll need strong Python and PyTorch skills, good C++, experience with GPU-accelerated simulation, and the ability to debug real-world robotic behaviour. Experience with hydraulic machinery, large-scale deployments, imitation learning or production rollout strategies would be useful.You’ll have genuine scope to influence the technical direction as the autonomy team builds a long-lived system designed to operate across the construction industry. If you want your RL work to move from simulation into machines doing real work, this is an opportunity to do exactly that.You’ll need:2–5 years’ industry RL experience in control or planningProven deployment on physical robotsStrong Python/PyTorch and good C++Experience with simulation and sim-to-realWillingness to travel when projects require itIf the challenge fits your background, let’s have a conversation about the role and the problems you’d be working on.
Paddy HobsonPaddy Hobson
Posted 14 days ago
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Munich, Bayern, Germany
Robotics Platform Lead – AI & Autonomous Systems
Permanent€100000 per annum
Munich | HybridWe are supporting the growth of a European robotics business building intelligent machines for real-world environments.As their engineering organisation grows, they are looking for a senior technical leader who can take a broad view of the technology behind their robotic systems — connecting software, autonomy, machine learning and the underlying compute platform.This could suit someone currently operating as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Systems Architect, Technical Lead or Engineering Lead who wants greater ownership of an entire robotics platform.The OpportunityThe challenge here isn't simply developing new robotics capabilities. It's making increasingly sophisticated technology work consistently outside of a controlled development environment.You'll help determine how the platform evolves as the business moves towards larger-scale deployment.That could mean working on questions such as:How should the different software and autonomy components interact?Where are the biggest reliability or performance bottlenecks?How do you make deployment and updates safer and more repeatable?How should engineering teams test increasingly complex robotic behaviours?What needs to change as a system moves from a small number of machines to a significantly larger deployed fleet?How do you create engineering foundations that allow AI and robotics teams to iterate quickly without compromising system stability?You'll have significant influence over these decisions while remaining close to the engineering itself.Your BackgroundWe're open to people coming from several areas of advanced engineering.You may have built systems within:Robotics · Autonomous Driving · Drones/UAVs · Industrial Automation · Edge AI · Embedded/Real-Time Systems · Physical AIMore important than the exact industry is experience building software where AI or autonomous decision-making ultimately has to work on a physical system in the real world.We're particularly interested in people who combine:Strong software engineering fundamentalsSystems architecture experienceRobotics or autonomous systems knowledgeExperience deploying software onto edge/embedded hardwareProduction engineering and reliabilityTechnical leadership across multidisciplinary teamsYou should be comfortable moving between high-level technical decisions and detailed engineering discussions.This isn't intended to be a purely managerial position. You'll be expected to understand the technology deeply, challenge technical decisions and contribute directly where your expertise has the greatest impact.What Makes This InterestingYou'll join at a point where many of the fundamental technical decisions around the platform are still being shaped.Rather than owning one isolated component, you'll work across the wider system and help establish how the company's robotics technology is engineered, deployed and scaled over the coming years.It's particularly relevant for someone who enjoys the intersection of robotics, software architecture and AI, and wants ownership beyond an individual subsystem.Location: Munich, GermanyWorking model: HybridFor more information, apply or get in touch for a confidential discussion.
Harriet NolanHarriet Nolan
Posted 27 days ago
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