Senior Software Engineer - Robotic Controls

The posting, as 1X wrote it

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 p

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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.