Senior to Staff Gameplay Engineer
About The Position
1X is building humanoid robots designed to perform household tasks and give people their time back. This involves solving complex problems in robotics, AI, and manufacturing at scale. The company is shipping its flagship product, NEO, a home robot designed to move, learn, and operate safely alongside people. 1X is looking for individuals inspired by the challenge of creating technology that genuinely changes how humans spend their time by safely creating abundance for all. The Behavior team specifically focuses on developing the software that enables NEO to behave as an intelligent, autonomous character. This includes creating decision-making systems, world simulation, and behavior frameworks that allow robots to perceive their surroundings, understand context, prioritize goals, and interact naturally in dynamic environments. The role bridges the gap between game AI and embodied intelligence, aiming to create robots that behave as naturally and reliably as the best NPCs in modern games.
Requirements
- 6+ years of professional experience (Senior) or 10+ years (Staff) developing gameplay systems, conversational AI, NPC behaviors, or system architecture.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Game Development, Robotics, AI, or a related technical field.
- Strong proficiency in C++, system programming, and object-oriented software design.
- Experience working with Unreal Engine, Unity, proprietary game engines, or large-scale simulation environments.
Nice To Haves
- Experience implementing behavior trees, GOAP, hierarchical state machines, planners, or similar AI architectures under tight performance constraints.
- Experience building open-world games, large-scale simulations, conversational AI, or emergent gameplay systems.
- Familiarity with robotics, autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI.
- Experience with navigation systems, pathfinding, task scheduling, perception systems, or world modeling.
- Experience developing tools that enable designers, researchers, or engineers to rapidly author and debug complex AI behaviors.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement scalable behavior architectures that enable robots to autonomously perform complex, multi-step household tasks leveraging cloud-based world models.
- Build decision-making frameworks using behavior trees, hierarchical state machines, or similar AI architectures.
- Partner with Core, World Model, Apps, and Motion teams to integrate behavior systems into real-world robot operation.
- Improve the realism, robustness, and adaptability of robot behaviors while establishing engineering best practices for large-scale behavior development.
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
