VLA/WAM Integration & Deployment Engineer

Location: San Francisco, California, United States, Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

Workplace: on_site

Description

About Flexion

At Flexion, we're building the intelligence layer powering the next generation of humanoid robots. Our mission is to accelerate the transition from fragile prototypes to real-world humanoid deployment. We are founded by leading scientists in robot reinforcement learning (ex-Nvidia, ex-ETH Zürich), and backed by leading international VC firms. In just months, we’ve gone from our first line of code to deploying real humanoid capabilities.

The role

As our VLA/WAM Integration and Deployment specialist you'll turn our VLA and World-Action Model research into reliable capabilities running on real humanoid robots.

You will work across the full deployment loop: integrating foundation models with agentic systems, optimizing inference, collecting targeted real-world data, running principled evaluations, and feeding deployment experience back into training.

This is a broad, hands-on role for someone who enjoys making advanced models work as part of a complete autonomous system rather than optimizing a single research component in isolation.

Key responsibilities

• VLA/WAM Deployment: Deploy and validate learned policies across multiple humanoid platforms and real-world tasks.
• Fast Inference: Optimize model serving, latency, action generation, asynchronous execution, and closed-loop control for real-time robot operation.
• Agentic Integration: Connect VLA/WAM policies with higher-level agents for task decomposition, policy selection, structured conditioning, verification, recovery, and replanning.
• In-Situ Data Collection: Develop improved workflows for teleoperation, interventions, autonomous rollouts, failures, recoveries, and targeted post-training data collection.
• Evaluation & Testing: Develop reproducible real-robot evaluations, regression suites, failure analysis, and principled comparisons between model versions.
• Deployment-to-Training Loop: Turn real-world successes and failures into datasets and experiments that improve subsequent pre-training and post-training.

Requirements

• Strong Python and PyTorch skills and experience working with modern deep-learning systems.
• Experience deploying learning-based models in robotics, autonomous systems, or another real-time embodied setting.
• Familiarity with VLA, VLM, diffusion, flow-matching, video/world-model, or related multimodal architectures.
• Strong systems intuition around inference latency, model serving, data pipelines, logging, and debugging complex ML systems.
• Experience designing rigorous evaluation and diagnosing failures in learned systems.
• Comfort working directly with robots, sensors, data collection, and imperfect real-world hardware.
• Ability to work across model training, deployment, data, infrastructure, and integration rather than within a narrowly defined research area.

Bonus:

• Experience with agentic AI systems, tool use, hierarchical policies, planning, or closed-loop verification.
• Experience with TensorRT, torch.compile, quantization, model compression, or other inference optimization techniques.
• Experience with teleoperation, human-in-the-loop learning, autonomous data collection, or online/post-training workflows.
• Experience with humanoids, dexterous manipulation, loco-manipulation, or whole-body control.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, continual learning, and sim-to-real.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Enhanced pension plan
• Enhanced holiday & paid leave perks
• Relocation & permit sponsorship
• Central Zürich office with top-tier robotics testing facilities and infrastructure
• Joining Europe's leading robotics team & exposure to never-done-before research
• Energetic, collaborative culture with a bias for action and regular community events
• Competitive Compensation
• Joining a leading robotics team & exposure to never-done-before research
• Energetic, collaborative culture with a bias for action and regular community events

Zurich

• Enhanced pension plan
• Relocation & permit sponsorship
• Enhanced holiday & paid leave perks
• Central Zürich office with top-tier robotics testing facilities and infrastructure

San Francisco

• 401(k) with company contributions
• Health, dental & vision coverage with the flexibility to choose your own plan
• Open PTO policy & paid company holidays