AI Residency

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 Program

The AI Residency is a fixed-term position (3-6 months) for researchers and engineers who want to work on high-impact AI and robotics problems alongside full-time 1X team members. Residents work on real projects—simulation infrastructure, data management, model evaluation, and capability deployment—that ship to production robots in the field. This is not an internship where you build toy demos: you will contribute meaningfully to the systems that make NEO smarter, and your work will reach hardware in homes and warehouses.

Your Charter

Accelerate 1X's AI development by applying cutting-edge research to real product problems, whether that means building evaluation infrastructure, scaling data pipelines, improving the data engine, or deploying new capabilities to robots at customer sites. Residents are embedded in the team and treated as full contributors: you will own projects, ship code, and have direct impact on deployed robotic systems within your residency term.

Key Outcomes

• Apply research-level ideas to production impact translating techniques from the AI and robotics literature into capabilities or infrastructure that ships on real robots

• Build or meaningfully improve components of the data engine: front-end tooling for log review and labeling, back-end systems for data cleaning, and evaluation benchmarks for open-source models on robotics tasks

• Scale solutions using fleet data contributing to pipelines and systems that improve with more robot experience, not just more hand-labeled data

• Deploy at least one new capability or infrastructure improvement to robots at customer sites before the residency term ends

Key Competencies

• Fast, independent learner picking up new codebases, tools, and problem domains quickly; identifies the highest-leverage contribution and starts making progress without waiting for a detailed spec

• Research meets engineering reading a paper and implementing its key ideas, but also writes tested, maintainable code that others can build on; comfortable in both modes

• Prototype-to-production instinct moving quickly from idea to working prototype, then cares enough about quality to bring it the rest of the way to something deployable

• Collaborative contributor working effectively alongside full-time engineers and researchers, communicates progress and blockers clearly, and contributes to the team's velocity as well as their own projects

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent; graduate students in ML or robotics strongly preferred

• Proficiency with large Python codebases, experience writing tests, and familiarity with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX)

• Demonstrated ability to prototype ideas independently and rapidly—a portfolio of projects, research, or open-source work is a strong signal

• Experience training large-scale ML models (visual foundation models, LLMs, generative models) or publishing at top ML conferences

Preferred Skills

• Experience with systems programming and scalable data infrastructure

• Familiarity with robotics simulation platforms (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo) or robot middleware (ROS)

• Prior research or engineering experience at the intersection of AI and physical systems

Benefits & Compensation

• $10,000 per month

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k) with company match

• Paid time off and holidays