Founding Robotics Engineer (Manipulation) in London

Whistle Robotics is making automation accessible to every factory. Our mission is to help small and medium-sized manufacturers increase productivity, extend machine utilisation, and overcome labour shortages. We do this by building intelligent, task-specific robots that can be deployed quickly and easily, starting with CNC machine tending. Our team combines deep technical and commercial expertise. Our CEO, Pete, is a repeat founder who previously built and exited a venture-backed manufacturing company, while our CTO, Gio, has spent 15 years building software at the intersection of AI and advanced manufacturing (CloudNC and Autodesk). We are backed by leading investors in AI and robotics.

As our founding Robotics Engineer (Manipulation), you will be responsible for the dexterity layer that allows the robot to precisely insert parts into workholding with sub-millimeter precision, and near-perfect reliability. As a member of our team, you will own our manipulation stack, implement algorithms, influence our design decisions and tech choices.

What you will do:

• Perception-Driven Control: Implement and optimize grasp synthesis and quality estimation to handle parts with varying geometries and orientations.
• Contact-Rich Manipulation: Develop force-aware control strategies for high-precision and high-dexterity tasks.
• Motion Planning: Integrate and tune best-in-class motion planners (e.g., MoveIt, OMPL, or Nvidia cuMotion) to ensure collision-free, speed-optimized trajectories in dynamic environments.
• Simulation Pipeline: Build and maintain high-fidelity simulations (Isaac Sim/Gym, Gazebo, or MuJoCo) to stress-test manipulation logic, validate corner cases, and generate synthetic data before we touch the physical hardware.
• On-Site Iteration: Step out of the lab and onto our customers’ factory floors to debug and refine how our robots handle real-world environments.

Who you are:

• You are an experienced robotics engineer who loves seeing code move real physical hardware.
• You are looking to join an early team where you can make a difference.
• You can write very reliable code and think of corner-cases before they happen.
• You have opinions about what good code looks like, but you hold those opinions weakly and align with the team.
• You are deeply familiar with ROS2 and motion planning libraries.
• You have experience in robotic grasping, path planning, and/or force-torque control.
• You have experience with Nvidia Isaac Sim, or similar tools for robot modeling and validation.
• You are comfortable with coordinate transforms, Kinematics, and Dynamics.

A Note on "Experience": Research shows that exceptional people from underrepresented groups often only apply to jobs if they meet 100% of the criteria. If you are a brilliant engineer who loves building things, but you don't check every single box above, please apply anyway. We value talent, grit, and the ability to learn over a perfect resume.

Ground-floor opportunity: Be part of our founding team. You will have a significant equity stake and a direct influence on the company’s trajectory.

Real-world meaning and impact: We are deploying robots today. Your work will enable small local businesses to adopt Physical AI and drive the reshoring of production.

World-class team: Work directly with founders who have been there and done it, in both manufacturing and deep-tech AI.

The lab: A well-equipped workspace in London where you have the tools, resources, and autonomy to build.

Our values: We are a small, high-velocity team. We look for people who resonate with:

• Driven by curiosity: You aren't afraid to dive into a problem outside your core discipline. You approach every problem with humility and a strong desire to learn.
• Focused and incremental: You ship high-quality products fast. You achieve that, not by working extra hours, but by working methodically, incrementally, constantly testing your own assumptions and focusing on the right things. Building a meaningful business is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Extreme ownership: You don't wait for a ticket to be assigned. You see a gap in the product? You design a solution and you implement it.
• Greater than the sum of parts: You amplify everyone around you. We are building something that matters, and we can’t do that alone. We work hard, in person, because the best engineering happens when the team is at the whiteboard (or the workbench) together.