Staff Software Engineer - Applied AI

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 Applied AI team owns all of the systems and services that integrate AI into the NEO platform including supporting data infrastructure for the World Model Lab. They ship platform APIs that allow our developers to collect data for fine-tuning, deploy inference at scale, and integrate AI elsewhere in the robot software stack.

Your Charter

Build platform APIs for high-quality training data for our new world model. This will involve APIs for data validation, auto-captioning/annotation, and validation. You’ll operate at high scale, support a wide variety of developers, and work closely with our internal World Model team to pretrain a new world model. You will also find opportunities to integrate AI in other systems elsewhere in the stack.

Key Outcomes

• Design, build, and ship production features for AI world models, from data collection through inference

• Build rigorous evaluation, data pipelines, and captioning APIs tightly integrated into simulators and robot hardware

• Optimize systems for latency, cost, and quality

• Work closely with world model researchers, product engineers, and customers to build systems that are reliable and easy to use

• Stay current with new developments in AI and bring recommendations to the platform and research teams.

Key Competencies

• Deep expertise building developer tooling, simulation platforms, or game engine infrastructure.

• Strong systems thinking with experience designing scalable content pipelines and engineering workflows.

• Experience creating easy to use tools that empowers developers, designers, or technical artists.

• Excellent software engineering skills with a focus on performance, maintainability, and automation.

• Comfortable driving technical direction across multidisciplinary teams in a fast-moving startup environment.

Minimum Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion spent building and shipping ML- or AI-powered systems in production.

• Strong programming skills in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript and proved experience building expandable, testable, and reliable software.

• Hands-on experience with modern AI/ML, AI frameworks, and cloud deployment

• Clear communication and collaboration to lead projects independently

Preferred Skills

• Experience with shipping AI/ML systems at high scale.

• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or publications

• Domain experience in robotics

What does a successful 1X Team Member look like:

Team members at 1X who thrive here are builders. They move fast, own their work completely, and treat time like it’s the one thing you can’t get back - because it is. They say what they mean, finish what they start, and hold themselves to a standard before anyone has to ask. We push each other to be better, and we do it with honesty and respect.

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