Tech Lead, Robot Character

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. 

As NEO lives and learns among us, we are looking for a Robot Character Tech Lead to build the multi-modal foundation models that combine emotive intelligence, personality, and body language with our task-focused AI capabilities. In this role, you will lead the team that imbues NEO with the ability to communicate non-verbally and verbally with humans and make the human-robot user experience magical.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term vision, architecture, and milestones for an intelligent and friendly assistant character.

• Develop low-latency streaming multi-modal neural network architectures that combine language, audio, non-verbal cues, and emit expressive behavior and speech.

• Own the character-building process from research to production, with a focus on a totally integrated product experience that is the primary UX of interacting with NEO and it’s full feature set.

• Build and lead a high-caliber team.

• Set the quality bar and guardrails to ensure that our robots evoke trust, warmth, and competence in their interactions with people.

• 10+ years of building AI/ML systems with real-world deployments, including substantial leadership experience (such as starting your own chatbot company).

• A portfolio of shipped AI-enabled products, ideally in AI companions, conversational systems, real-time interactive media, or friendly robots.

• Deep knowledge of state-of-the-art LLMs, Generative AI, multi-modal models, and reinforcement learning.

• Passion for human-centered AI: you think about the user experience as much as the algorithms for training the model.

• Strong builder’s mindset: you thrive in ambiguity and move quickly from concept to code to product.

• Storytelling, leadership, and recruiting ability: you attract great people to join you and inspire them to do their best work, and raise the intensity bar of the entire organization.

Please answer the following question in your application:

Consider an interaction where you walk up to a person, hand them an object, and then ask them to describe what you’ve given them. How fast can a person do this? How would you get NEO to listen, react, and respond at 1X human speed? What are the main technical challenges, and how could you make this as fast and intelligent as possible?

Why this role and why now?

If you have a founder mindset and have ever thought “I could probably build a better AI companion than what’s out there”, this is your chance to do it. Not for a smartphone app, but for the next frontier of human-computer interaction: robots that you live with. Instead of starting the Nth ChatGPT clone, join us and build your vision on a real platform with world-class safe hardware, rich multi-modal sensors, and passionate colleagues.

Location Policy:

We believe the best work is done when collaborating and therefore require in-person presence in our office locations.

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 $200,000 to $300,000. Your actual salary will be based on your knowledge, skills and experience.