Senior Robotics Controls Engineer

About 1X

We’re an AI and robotics company based in Palo Alto, California, on a mission to build a truly abundant society through general‑purpose robots capable of performing any kind of work autonomously.
We believe that to truly understand the world and grow in intelligence, humanoid robots must live and learn alongside us. That’s why we’re focused on developing friendly home robots designed to integrate seamlessly into everyday life.
We’re looking for curious, driven, and passionate people who want to help shape the future of robotics and AI. If this mission excites you, we’d be thrilled to hear from you and explore how you might contribute to our journey.

Role Overview

As a Senior Robotics Controls Engineer, you will develop the real‑time software stack enabling the hardware to efficiently, elegantly, and deterministically manipulate and move through complex environments. You will work from low‑level motor control up through whole‑body dynamic control and estimation. Your efforts will help abstract the complexity of a high‑degree‑of‑freedom system—sensors, actuators, transmissions, and links—so higher‑level components like teleoperation and AI engines can command the robot via simple APIs. Your contributions will be central as we scale from R&D into full‑scale manufacturing.

Responsibilities

• Develop humanoid controls algorithms for balancing, locomotion, and manipulation

• Design fast and efficient state‑estimation algorithms

• Perform system identification (SysID) and calibration of actuators, transmissions, and full‑body kinematics

• Integrate hardware components and evaluate sensors

• Build tooling for hardware bring‑up and debugging

• Develop software for robot health monitoring, visualization, and logging

• Build and maintain APIs used by other software components to command the robot

• 3+ years of practical experience deploying and debugging controls or estimation‑adjacent software on high‑degree‑of‑freedom robots

• Solid understanding of rigid body dynamics, linear algebra, and numerical optimization

• Familiarity with optimization‑based whole body control, extended Kalman filter (EKF)‑based state estimators, or model predictive control for legged systems

• Proficiency working with large C++ code bases in a Linux development environment

• Familiarity with modern software development practices, source control, and testing methodologies

Preferred / Nice‑to‑Have

• Experience with Java, Unity/C#, Python, real‑time Linux, ROS2, and DDS

• Experience writing embedded C for interfacing with sensors or actuators

• Familiarity with the Yocto OS build system

• Personal experience building a robot or working with robotics hardware in spare time

Benefits & Compensation

• 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.