---
title: 'Software Engineer - Robotic Controls at 1X'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-robotic-controls-1x-san-carlos-k83dz7p5vqhm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-20'
---

# Software Engineer - Robotic Controls at 1X

- **Company:** [1X](https://feeny.ai/companies/1x)
- **Location:** San Carlos, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/1x/a02d07dc-851d-4246-bc1d-1f50412015c0

## Job description

## 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 Motion team enables NEO to move through and interact with the world. We build the perception NEO needs to understand its surroundings and locomote through any environment, and the control that lets it use its whole body to accomplish real tasks - crawling, bracing, climbing, lifting with more than just its arms. Because NEO operates around people, safe and compliant motion is a design constraint on everything we ship, not a feature layered on top.

## Your Charter

Build the foundation that NEO's whole-body control and manipulation strategies stand on. You will own state estimation, kinematics and robot models, system identification, and the sensor and signal conditioning underneath them, and define the interfaces the rest of the motion stack is built on. When a controller or a learned policy commands NEO, it is your estimates, models, and limits that it is trusting.

## Key Outcomes

- State Estimation: Ship floating-base pose and velocity, joint state, contact, and force/torque estimation that holds up through sensor noise, sensor dropout, and ambiguous contact signals.
- Kinematics and Robot Models: Own the robot models, frames, inverse kinematics, and command trajectory generation that downstream consumers resolve against, exposed through real-time-safe APIs and bindings.
- System Identification: Characterize actuators, tendons, and transmissions - friction, cogging, stiffness, slack, stretch - so models track real hardware unit to unit instead of being tuned around.
- Sensing and Signal Conditioning: Run sensor and modality trade studies for state estimation, then own the path from raw sensor to trusted signal - filtering, anti-aliasing, validity checks, temporal consistency.
- Diagnostics and Fault Response: Build the monitoring, limits, and fault reactions that let a robot detect a degraded joint or a thermal limit and degrade safely rather than fail unpredictably.
- Calibration and Bring-Up: Partner with production and service teams so calibration and bring-up procedures are correct, implemented, and actually followed across the line, the field, and each new robot generation.

## Key Competencies

- State Estimation Depth: Designs and tunes filters and observers against real sensor data, reasoning about bias observability, innovation gating, and graceful degradation when a sensor drops out.
- Comfort with Uncertainty: Builds estimators and models that hold up across a fleet where every robot differs and drifts, and quantifies confidence rather than assuming a golden unit.
- Kinematics and Dynamics: Fluent in rigid body kinematics, frame conventions, and robot modeling, and comfortable working through model libraries and URDF-based pipelines.
- Signal and Systems Instinct: Treats bandwidth, latency, aliasing, noise, and loop timing as first-class design constraints rather than tuning knobs discovered late.
- Root-Cause Analysis: Digs through logged robot data to find why something actually failed, and works with the mechanical and electrical teams to separate software faults from hardware ones.
- Technical Direction: Sets the approach for a problem area, defends tradeoffs across sensing, actuation, and compute, and partners with the hardware teams upstream and the teams consuming it downstream.

## Minimum Requirements

- Proven track record of shipping state estimation or control software on physical robots or comparable electromechanical systems
- Deep experience implementing and tuning state estimators such as EKF, UKF, invariant, or complementary filters against real, noisy sensor data from hardware that varies unit to unit
- Strong applied foundation in rigid body kinematics, frame transforms, and inverse kinematics and dynamics
- Hands-on experience with system identification and calibration of actuators, transmissions, or sensors
- High proficiency writing production-quality real-time C++ on Linux, with Python for tooling and analysis
- 5+ years of relevant industry experience, or an advanced degree plus equivalent hands-on experience

## Preferred Skills

- Background in tendon-driven or cable-driven actuation and dexterous end-effectors, including slack, stretch, and non-collocated sensing
- Experience with optimal control methods such as convex optimization, model predictive control, or trajectory optimization
- Experience fusing exteroceptive estimation such as visual-inertial odometry into a floating-base estimator
- Familiarity with real-time transport and fieldbus protocols such as EtherCAT or CAN
- Hands-on experience bringing up robot hardware from scratch, or working closely with firmware and electrical teams at the hardware-software boundary

## Compensation

- Salary Range: $200,000 - $300,000 + Equity

## Benefits

- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Generous paid time off, company holidays, and parental leave
- 401(k) plan with company match (100% on the first 3% of contributions, 50% on the next 2%)
- Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) options
- Commuter benefits (transit and parking)
- Short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental health, financial, and personal support
- Onsite snacks and catered lunches

## 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, justice system impact, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.

## About 1X

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: 1X develops general-purpose humanoid robots for home and industrial environments, combining AI and hardware to automate everyday tasks.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B funding stage)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Bernt Øyvind Børnich

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering / Artificial Intelligence
- **Target customers**: B2C (home consumers via NEO) and B2B/Enterprise (industrial tasks via EVE)
- **Mission**: Build a truly abundant society through general-purpose robots capable of performing any kind of work autonomously, allowing humans to focus on what they love.

## Products & Services
- **NEO**: A friendly home humanoid robot designed to integrate seamlessly into daily life and handle chores. Currently in early access after the NEO Beta (2024) and NEO Gamma (2025) iterations. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/about)
- **EVE**: A wheeled industrial humanoid deployed in factories worldwide for autonomous industrial tasks. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/about)
- **Revo1**: A high-torque-to-weight drive servo motor inspired by human tendon actuation, used in 1X robots. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/about)
- **1X World Model**: A physics-grounded video model that enables NEO to learn autonomously from text or voice commands. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $169M as of mid-2026, with a $100M Series B led by EQT Ventures in January 2024. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: EQT Ventures (lead), plus other investors in secondary rounds. Acquired Kind Humanoid in January 2025. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Headcount grew 121.2% YoY to 394 employees. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
  - Full-scale production of NEO began in Hayward, CA, with capacity to build 10,000 units per year. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
  - New Palo Alto HQ consolidated teams from Sunnyvale and Moss, Norway. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
  - Appointed Mohi Khansari as Head of Robot Learning (January 2026) and Vikram Kothari as VP of Operations (August 2025). [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Vertical integration**: Owns manufacturing in Hayward (U.S.) and Moss (Norway), controlling the full production stack.
- **Proprietary hardware**: Revo1 servo motor offers world-leading torque-to-weight ratio, enabling flexible, low-gear-ratio robotics.
- **AI-first approach**: The 1X World Model allows robots to learn physical tasks via simulation and self-supervised video prediction, reducing need for manual programming.
- **Early home deployment**: NEO is one of the first humanoid robots entering private homes, giving 1X real-world data and feedback loops.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling NEO production and expanding early access to more households across the U.S.
- Enhancing AI capabilities through the World Model and reinforcement learning (e.g., Redwood mobility controller).
- Building a robust supply chain and service network for home robots.
- Continuing enterprise deployments of EVE while shifting emphasis to the consumer market.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast-paced, mission-driven environment focused on building humanoid robots that coexist with humans. Strong emphasis on AI, hardware, and real-world impact.
- **Work model**: Likely on-site for hardware and AI roles (multiple offices in Palo Alto, San Carlos, Sunnyvale, Hayward, and Moss). Some software roles may offer flexibility.
- **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge robotics and AI, contribute to a product (NEO) that is already entering homes, and be part of a rapidly scaling company with strong funding.
- **Engineering culture**: High concentration of talent from Tesla, Apple, Google, and SpaceX. Active research in biomechanics, reinforcement learning, and simulation. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)
- **Open roles**: 65+ positions listed on the careers page across AI, hardware, software, operations, and manufacturing. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/careers)

## Sources
1. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/about)
2. [1x.tech](https://www.1x.tech/careers)
3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/1x-technologies)

## Other roles at 1X

- [Internship - CNC Machine Park](https://feeny.ai/job/internship-cnc-machine-park-1x-hayward-bdkw3zkk5pa2) — Hayward, CA
- [Production Supervisor - Body](https://feeny.ai/job/production-supervisor-body-1x-hayward-kasd33mpzjgt) — Hayward, CA
- [Production Supervisor - Hands](https://feeny.ai/job/production-supervisor-hands-1x-san-carlos-nagxpxvb4bza) — San Carlos, CA
- [Robot Assembly Technician](https://feeny.ai/job/robot-assembly-technician-1x-hayward-b4yt43a0s439) — Hayward, CA
- [Robot Assembly Technician - Hands](https://feeny.ai/job/robot-assembly-technician-hands-1x-san-carlos-217s2y4txr3t) — San Carlos, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-1x-san-carlos-7syy9m0c2esv) — San Carlos, CA
- [AI Researcher - Perception](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-perception-1x-san-carlos-ydyqjrthn02c) — San Carlos, CA
- [Internship - Manufacturing Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/internship-manufacturing-engineering-1x-san-carlos-w4x93jk7gwpw) — San Carlos, CA
- [Motor Test Technician](https://feeny.ai/job/motor-test-technician-1x-san-carlos-zsyhcdhha6ew) — San Carlos, CA
- [Operator - Data Collection (Swing Shift)](https://feeny.ai/job/operator-data-collection-swing-shift-1x-san-carlos-36y5yx97sgj2) — San Carlos, CA