Research Engineer, Autonomy

Target start date: Immediately. Relocation provided.

Since its founding in 2015, 1X has been at the forefront of developing advanced humanoid robots designed for household use. Our mission is to create an abundant supply of labor via safe, intelligent humanoids. At 1X, you’ll own critical projects, tackle unsolved research problems, deliver great products to customers, and be rewarded based on merit and achievement.

We are looking for a Research Engineer in Autonomy. In this role, you will train NEO to do autonomous, long-horizon tasks in unstructured environments. 

Tech Stack

• Linux

• Python / Bazel

• PyTorch

• Isaac Sim / Mujoco

Location

The role is based in Palo Alto, CA. Candidates are expected to be in-person at the office.

Responsibilities

• Extreme ownership of autonomous capabilities, from reviewing data to model architecture design to shipping the model to ensuring that performance is maintained across the fleet over time

• Train NEO to do whole body manipulation and navigation tasks in unseen environments

• Design high-quality eval metrics that allow us to confidently scale model pre-training

• Experiment with recently published techniques in VLM and generative models literature to predict actions

• Work with controls, QA, and data collection teams to ship RL policies to the production fleet

• Getting general-purpose robots to work in the home is just about the hardest problem one can work on. We are looking for people with the courage to tackle unsolved technical challenges with an intense work ethic.

• 4+ years of Python programming experience.

• Strong empirical research abilities and a sense for what makes for high quality robot data

Ideal Experiences

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science or related field

• Published robot learning research in top ML conferences (NeurIPS, CoRL, RSS, ICML, etc.)

• Experience writing testing infrastructure for data loaders and robotics datasets.

Sample Projects

We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification. Here are some example projects you might work on at 1X. If you have direct experience in solving one of the “sample projects” listed below, please let us know in your cover letter.

• Teaching virtual or physical agents to adapt in-context and retry tasks.

• Using VLMs to automate large scale robotic dataset curation.

• Teaching robots to learn from suboptimal episodes.

Interview Process

• The team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work

• 15 minute phone conversation with our talent acquisition team

• 45-minute virtual interview with a team member asking a coding question in the language of your choice.

• On-site interview (in-person or virtual) consisting of 4 technical interviews (mix of coding, systems design, open-ended research interview)

• Background reference checks

• Offer

Compensation

At 1X your work and results will be rewarded with a total rewards package consisting of a base salary, stock options and benefits. Base salary range is $150,000 to $300,000. Your actual salary will be based on your knowledge, skills and experience.