Field Lead – ARIA Smarter Robot Bodies

This year, we delivered 10 projects for the ARIA Smarter Robot Bodies; next year, you’ll scope and help deliver another 10.

We’re hiring someone to lead our work with ARIA’s Smarter Robot Bodies (SRB) programme. Likely an engineer who wants to spend lots of time with academic and industrial research groups understanding their problems and turning them into actionable work plans for us to deliver. You’ll work at Amodo as part of our core team but spend a lot of time interacting with ARIA and their grantees.

You will be responsible for scoping engineering projects with ARIA’s Creators (grantees). To do this, you will:

• Meet with all of the SRB scientists and engineers
• Understand the engineering challenges in their work
• Ideate how to solve their challenges
• Turn these ideas into comprehensive engineering work plans, scopes, and specifications
• Following review with ARIA, take these engineering work plans and help your colleagues at Amodo deliver them
• Be the engineer on hand to advise Jenny, Radhika, and Paul (ARIA’s SRB team)
• Look for further opportunities to accelerate the SRB programme

Here’s a sample of what we’ve done for the Smarter Robot Bodies programme in 2025:

• Created a new electrical impedance tomography system for the University of Cambridge.
• A low force, ultra accurate materials tester.
• Provided quick turnaround support for the Smarter Robot Bodies Hackathon.
• Developed a new efficient 2kV power supply with arbitrary waveform output.

This role suits someone who:

• Loves engineering problem-solving
• Wants to work with some of the world’s best academic groups and startups
• Wants to work at a pace
• Loves spotting gaps in fields - you’ll be a force multiplier on the SRB programme, noticing where Amodo can accelerate the programme.
• Is excited to accelerate a field, think about metascience, and take responsibility for driving change.

I think this is one of the most exciting engineering jobs in the UK because:

• You’ll build an unrivalled network across ARIA and ARIA’s Creators
• You get to work closely with Jenny’s Smarter Robot Bodies team
• You’ll be responsible for guiding millions of pounds of engineering R&D effort per year. If done well, this could radically accelerate the SRB programme
• You get to engage on a deep technical level with world-leading research groups, and do this across >20 different technical areas.

About you

We value drive, culture fit, and a track record of exceptional achievement above all else, but the competencies, interests, and attributes below are highly desirable:

• Outstanding academic background—likely from a rigorous discipline (STEM - Engineer, Physics, Product Design, +) at a top university, with a track record that stands out.
• Track record of discovering and solving technical problems.
• Charisma and strong communication skills that let you context-switch between rallying a team, engaging with clients, and explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to get hard things done: founded something, shipped a project that mattered, led a team, won a competition, or otherwise proved you don’t just think about impact—you create it.
• Genuine intellectual curiosity about how the world works and how to make it better. You probably follow frontier tech development, think seriously about which problems matter most, and have opinions on how to solve them.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity—you can take an ill-defined problem, break it down, and drive it to completion without hand-holding.