AI Researcher

1X•San Carlos, CA

22h•Remote

About The Position

The 1X World Model Lab is an embodied AI research organization focused on pretraining foundation models to accelerate the emergence of embodied intelligence. As the lab grows, researchers contribute where they have the most leverage, and the problems worth solving span every layer of the stack. The lab is founded on a simple thesis: robotics is not a fine-tuning problem. To build truly general humanoids, we need to pretrain on the most important data from the very beginning. Your Charter: Advance NEO's intelligence by building the AI systems, infrastructure, and data engines that enable the robot to learn from experience and become increasingly capable in real-world environments.

Requirements

Strong Python and PyTorch (or equivalent deep learning framework), with experience in large-scale codebases and data tooling and visualization.
Demonstrated experience in at least one area of the four pillars of AI: model and data, data infrastructure, ML infrastructure, or evaluation protocols.
Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field; graduate-level education or equivalent research experience strongly preferred.
Track record of impact: published research, deployed production in modern AI systems, or infrastructure that measurably accelerated a team's work.

Nice To Haves

Experience with distributed training frameworks (TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, FSDP/ZeRO) and/or large-scale data processing pipeline and ETL systems spanning on-device, on-premise, and cloud infrastructure.
Experience with multi-modal generative models, world models, diffusion models, or autoregressive architectures.
Experience with inference optimization techniques: quantization (PTQ, QAT, INT8/FP8), CUDA/Triton kernel development, or serving systems (TensorRT or equivalent).

Responsibilities

Build large multi-modal generative world models that learn from robot experience, spanning model architecture, tokenization, and large-scale training and data processing.
Advance the robot's ability to predict, plan, and act in unstructured environments.
Design and operate the data engine that enables training on all visual and robot data, from web-scale media, to egocentric and synthetic data, and most importantly, on-policy NEO data.
Build large-scale data infrastructure that enables annotation and curation at scale, crucial to scale up World Model training.
Own the distributed training and inference systems that keep GPUs fully utilized.
Increase the throughput during training, and speed of inference, to supercharge the model’s ability in the lab and in the world.
Build the evaluation infrastructure that connects pre-training metrics to real-world robot performance: benchmarks, evals frameworks, model ranking systems, and the tooling that lets the team iterate on architectures with confidence that lab results predict what happens in the the real physical world.
Advance robot capabilities through research, scaling data pipelines, optimizing training and inference throughput, or building evaluations that make lab results predictive of field performance.
Build infrastructure that multiplies team research velocity: pipelines that are faster, evaluations that are more predictive, training systems that are more efficient, or tooling that eliminates manual work across the lab.
Ship research to production: own the path from experimental result to deploy capability on robot hardware, and measure impact by what NEO can do, not just what the model achieves on benchmarks.
Contribute to a learning flywheel where more robot experience leads to better models, better models enable more capable robots, and more capable robots generate richer experience.