Senior to Staff Gameplay Engineer
About The Position
1X is building humanoid robots for home use, aiming to automate chores and tasks to give people more free time. This involves solving complex challenges in robotics, AI, and manufacturing simultaneously, at scale, and in a safe form factor for family environments. The company has been working on these problems since 2014 and is now focused on shipping its flagship product, NEO, a home robot designed for real-world operation alongside people. 1X is scaling and hiring intentionally, seeking individuals passionate about creating technology that genuinely changes how humans spend their time by safely creating abundance. The Behavior team at 1X develops the software that enables NEO to act as an intelligent, autonomous character within a home environment. Inspired by modern game AI, the team creates decision-making systems, world simulation, and behavior frameworks that allow robots to perceive their surroundings, understand context, prioritize goals, and interact naturally in dynamic settings. The engineering challenges are similar to those in building believable NPCs, conversational AI, or complex gameplay engine systems, but applied to real robots.
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.
- Deep expertise building gameplay systems, conversational AI, or NPC behaviors for complex interactive environments.
- Strong understanding of decision-making architectures, planning systems, and autonomous agent behaviors.
- Excellent software engineering skills with experience building scalable, performance-critical systems in C++.
- Strong systems thinking with the ability to simplify complex autonomous behaviors into maintainable software architectures.
- Comfortable leading technical initiatives and collaborating across multidisciplinary engineering teams in a fast-moving environment.
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
