AI Research Engineer - Infrastructure

AI Research Engineer - Infrastructure

San Carlos, CA (on-site)

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 1X World Model Lab is an embodied AI research organization focused on pretraining the foundation models to accelerate the emergence of embodied intelligence.

The lab is founded on a simple thesis: robotics is not a fine-tuning problem. To build truly general humanoids, we need to pretrain on the most important data from the very beginning.

Your Charter

Own the infrastructure that enables 1X's AI to improve continuously at scale, spanning the data pipelines that make fleet experience training-ready and the distributed training and inference systems that turn data into capability. This is critical-path work: the speed at which 1X's robots learn is directly determined by how efficiently we collect high-quality data, how reliably we run large training jobs, and how effectively we deploy the resulting models to hardware. Depending on your background and interests, you will focus on data infrastructure, compute scaling, or both.

Key Outcomes

• Build and operate data pipelines that make fleet-collected robot experience consistently queryable, well-labeled, and training-ready, automating ETL across on-robot, on-premise, and cloud infrastructure

• Own distributed training infrastructure that supports GPU runs reliably: fault tolerance, experiment tracking, throughput optimization, and distributed operations at scale

• Optimize inference performance for both datacenter workloads (world models, diffusion engines) and on-device robot policies, using quantization, scheduling, and distillation to reduce latency and improve throughput

• Deliver annotation and dataset tooling: visualization interfaces, labeling automation, ML-based dataset organization that accelerates the data-to-model cycle for the research team

• Ensure compute is never the constraint: design systems where data quality and quantity, not infrastructure bottlenecks, determine the limits of what the models can learn

Key Competencies

• Scale-first mindset believes scale is foundational to capable humanoid robotics; designs systems with 10x and 100x growth in mind, and pushes to remove whatever is currently the binding constraint on model improvement

• Full-pipeline thinker understands the path from robot sensor to trained model and can reason about bottlenecks at every layer: data collection, labeling quality, training throughput, and inference latency

• Hands-on optimizer comfortable writing CUDA or Triton kernels, tuning distributed training configurations, or redesigning ETL pipelines, whichever layer needs work

• Production-minded researcher transforms experimental systems into reliable, production-grade platforms; brings engineering rigor to infrastructure that other teams depend on every day

Benefits & Compensation

• Salary Range: $180,000 - $300,000 + Equity

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k) with company match

• Paid time off and holidays

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, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.

Minimum Requirements

• Strong programming experience in Python and/or C++

• Degree in Computer Science or a related field

• Experience in distributed training frameworks (e.g., TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, FSDP/ZeRO) and/or large-scale data pipeline and ETL systems

• Deep understanding of training and inference bottlenecks—familiar with scaling laws, throughput optimization, and the hardware characteristics that shape them

Preferred Skills

• Experience developing or tuning CUDA or Triton kernels with understanding of hardware-level optimization: vectorization, tensor cores, memory hierarchies

• Familiarity with quantization strategies (PTQ, QAT, INT8/FP8) and inference serving systems (TensorRT or equivalent)

• Experience designing data collection and management systems for robotic or physical AI fleets, including annotation tooling, dataset visualization, and automated labeling

• Experience collaborating with external dataset providers or curating large-scale multi-modal pre-training datasets

Benefits & Compensation

• Salary Range: $180,000 - $300,000 + Equity

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k) with company match

• Paid time off and holidays

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, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.