Staff Software Engineer - Applied AI

About the role

We’re building humanoid robots that work in home—doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back. To do this right, we have to solve robotics, AI, and 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.

The Applied AI team owns all of the systems and services that integrate AI into the NEO platform, including supporting data infrastructure for the World Model Lab. They ship platform APIs that allow our developers to collect data for fine-tuning, deploy inference at scale, and integrate AI elsewhere in the robot software stack.

Your Charter

• Build platform APIs for high-quality training data for our new world model, including APIs for data validation, auto-captioning/annotation, and validation.
• Operate at high scale, support a wide variety of developers, and work closely with our internal World Model team to pretrain a new world model.
• Find opportunities to integrate AI in other systems elsewhere in the stack.

Key Outcomes

• Design, build, and ship production features for AI world models, from data collection through inference.
• Build rigorous evaluation, data pipelines, and captioning APIs tightly integrated into simulators and robot hardware.
• Optimize systems for latency, cost, and quality.
• Work closely with world model researchers, product engineers, and customers to build systems that are reliable and easy to use.
• Stay current with new developments in AI and bring recommendations to the platform and research teams.

Key Competencies

• Deep expertise building developer tooling, simulation platforms, or game engine infrastructure.
• Strong systems thinking with experience designing scalable content pipelines and engineering workflows.
• Experience creating easy-to-use tools that empower developers, designers, or technical artists.
• Excellent software engineering skills with a focus on performance, maintainability, and automation.
• Comfortable driving technical direction across multidisciplinary teams in a fast-moving startup environment.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion spent building and shipping ML- or AI-powered systems in production.
• Strong programming skills in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript, with proven experience building expandable, testable, and reliable software.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI/ML frameworks and cloud deployment.
• Clear communication and collaboration to lead projects independently.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with shipping AI/ML systems at high scale.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or publications.
• Domain experience in robotics.

About the team

Team members at 1X who thrive here are builders. They move fast, own their work completely, and treat time like it’s the one thing you can’t get back. They say what they mean, finish what they start, and hold themselves to a standard before anyone has to ask. We push each other to be better, and we do it with honesty and respect.

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.

Pay

Compensation Range: $250K - $300K