Senior Systems Software Engineer, Vision

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 Senior Systems Software Engineer for Vision, you will design, develop, and optimize the vision subsystem that powers our humanoid robots. You will work across hardware, firmware, AI, and platform teams to build low‑latency, high‑throughput vision systems that operate in real‑time on robot hardware. Your contributions will help enable perception, autonomy, and teleoperation at scale, ensuring performance, responsiveness, and robustness for robots operating in diverse environments.

Responsibilities

• Create and implement novel techniques to minimize system latency and computational load

• Utilize GPU acceleration for image processing and inference tasks, ensuring high performance and responsiveness in real‑time applications

• Develop low‑latency vision systems by integrating cameras, sensors, and image‑processing algorithms to enhance robotic perception

• Build and optimize real‑time streaming solutions, with efficient compression, decompression, and data transmission under limited compute resources

• Collaborate closely with cross‑functional teams to integrate vision systems into the overall robot architecture, contributing to teleoperation and autonomy stacks

• Strong experience with Linux and C++ programming

• Proven experience building large software applications in relevant domains

• Proficiency in managing memory and hardware resources in C++ and/or Rust

• Strong skills using C‑APIs to access low‑level system resources (e.g. V4L, POSIX, OpenGL, CUDA)

• Deep understanding of OS primitives and experience applying them in real‑time systems

• Demonstrated ability to optimize for low latency and high throughput on modern CPUs

• Experience working with hardware accelerators through low‑level C‑APIs

• Background in systems where latency is critical (such as robotics, real‑time control, gaming engines, or similar)

• (Nice to have) Understanding of modern CMOS cameras and image signal processing

• (Nice to have) Experience with video encoding/decoding and media streaming protocols (e.g. RTSP, RTP, SDP, WebRTC)

• (Nice to have) Knowledge of forward error correction techniques for unreliable network streams

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.