Software Engineer - Robotic Controls

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 faile …