Software Engineer - Robotic Controls
1X · San Carlos, United States · 1mo ago
About 1X
We're building humanoid robots that work in home - doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back. Simple, but it's not.
To do this right, we have to solve robotics, AI, manufacturing - at the same time, at scale, in a form factor that has to be safe enough to live with your family. If you're inspired by this, you'll thrive here. We've been at this since 2014 and we're at the point where the hard problems are behind us and the hard work is in front of us.
NEO is our flagship - a home robot designed to move, learn, and operate in the real world alongside real people. We're not demoing it - we're shipping it. We're excited to meet you, if this excites you.
If you've spent your career working on problems that matter and want to see them actually reach the world - this is that moment. We're scaling, we're hiring with intention, and we need people who want to build something that will genuinely change how humans spend their time - safely creating abundance for all.
About the Team
The Motion team enables NEO to move through and interact with the world. We build the perception NEO needs to understand its surroundings and locomote through any environment, and the control that lets it use its whole body to accomplish real tasks - crawling, bracing, climbing, lifting with more than just its arms. Because NEO operates around people, safe and compliant motion is a design constraint on everything we ship, not a feature layered on top.
Your Charter
Build the foundation that NEO's whole-body control and manipulation strategies stand on. You will own state estimation, kinematics and robot models, system identification, and the sensor and signal conditioning underneath them, and define the interfaces the rest of the motion stack is built on. When a controller or a learned policy commands NEO, it is your estimates, models, and limits that it is trusting.
Key Outcomes
State Estimation: Ship floating-base pose and velocity, joint state, contact, and force/torque estimation that holds up through sensor noise, sensor dropout, and ambiguous contact signals.
Kinematics and Robot Models: Own the robot models, frames, inverse kinematics, and command trajectory generation that downstream consumers resolve against, exposed through real-time-safe APIs and bindings.
System Identification: Characterize actuators, tendons, and transmissions - friction, cogging, stiffness, slack, stretch - so models track real hardware unit to unit instead of being tuned around.
Sensing and Signal Conditioning: Run sensor and modality trade studies for state estimation, then own the path from raw sensor to trusted signal - filtering, anti-aliasing, validity checks, temporal consistency.
Diagnostics and Fault Response: Build the monitoring, limits, and fault reactions that let a robot detect a degraded joint or a thermal limit and degrade safely rather than fail unpredictably.
Calibration and Bring-Up: Partner with production and service teams so calibration and bring-up procedures are correct, implemented, and actually followed across the line, the field, and each new robot generation.
Key Competencies
State Estimation Depth: Designs and tunes filters and observers against real sensor data, reasoning about bias observability, innovation gating, and graceful degradation when a sensor drops out.
Comfort with Uncertainty: Builds estimators and models that hold up across a fleet where every robot differs and drifts, and quantifies confidence rather than assuming a golden unit.
Kinematics and Dynamics: Fluent in rigid body kinematics, frame conventions, and robot modeling, and comfortable working through model libraries and URDF-based pipelines.
Signal and Systems Instinct: Treats bandwidth, latency, aliasing, noise, and loop timing as first-class design constraints rather than tuning knobs discovered late.
Root-Cause Analysis: Digs through logged robot data to find why something actually failed, and works with the mechanical and electrical teams to separate software faults from hardware ones.
Technical Direction: Sets the approach for a problem area, defends tradeoffs across sensing, actuation, and compute, and partners with the hardware teams upstream and the teams consuming it downstream.
Minimum Requirements
Proven track record of shipping state estimation or control software on physical robots or comparable electromechanical systems
Deep experience implementing and tuning state estimators such as EKF, UKF, invariant, or complementary filters against real, noisy sensor data from hardware that varies unit to unit
Strong applied foundation in rigid body kinematics, frame transforms, and inverse kinematics and dynamics
Hands-on experience with system identification and calibration of actuators, transmissions, or sensors
High proficiency writing production-quality real-time C++ on Linux, with Python for tooling and analysis
5+ years of relevant industry experience, or an advanced degree plus equivalent hands-on experience
Preferred Skills
Background in tendon-driven or cable-driven actuation and dexterous end-effectors, including slack, stretch, and non-collocated sensing
Experience with optimal control methods such as convex optimization, model predictive control, or trajectory optimization
Experience fusing exteroceptive estimation such as visual-inertial odometry into a floating-base estimator
Familiarity with real-time transport and fieldbus protocols such as EtherCAT or CAN
Hands-on experience bringing up robot hardware from scratch, or working closely with firmware and electrical teams at the hardware-software boundary
Compensation
Salary Range: $200,000 - $300,000 + Equity
Benefits
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
Generous paid time off, company holidays, and parental leave
401(k) plan with company match (100% on the first 3% of contributions, 50% on the next 2%)
Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) options
Commuter benefits (transit and parking)
Short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance
Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental health, financial, and personal support
Onsite snacks and catered lunches
Equal Opportunity Employer
1X is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, medical condition, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status, justice system impact, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.