Software Engineer - Core Systems
About The Position
1X is building humanoid robots for home use, aiming to automate chores and give people back their time. This involves solving complex challenges in robotics, AI, and manufacturing simultaneously. Their flagship product, NEO, is a home robot designed for real-world operation alongside people, and the company is focused on shipping it. 1X is seeking individuals inspired by the mission to create a product that will genuinely change how humans spend their time, safely creating abundance for all. The Foundations team specifically builds and owns the core C++ infrastructure for NEO's entire stack, including sensor pipelines, motor control interfaces, inter-process communication, and foundational libraries. This code runs thousands of times per second on hardware in the real world, and its correctness and performance are crucial for all other teams. Your role as a Software Engineer on the Foundations team will involve owning and improving the foundational C++ infrastructure that NEO's brain and nervous system depend on. The focus is on ensuring this infrastructure is fast, deterministic, and reliable as the company scales from prototypes to thousands of robots in homes and warehouses. This is critical-path work, where the latency, correctness, and maintainability of sensor pipelines, motor control loops, and IPC layers directly impact the perception, planning, and controls teams' ability to ship their work. Every improvement made in this role has a multiplying effect across all deployed robots.
Requirements
- 5+ years shipping production C++ in performance-critical systems: robotics, autonomous vehicles, HFT, game engines, OS/runtime, compilers, or HPC
- Demonstrated ability to profile, benchmark, and debug at the systems level: flamegraphs, perf counters, assembly inspection, and Linux kernel interfaces
- Proven track record of writing systems code other engineers build on clean interfaces, minimal dependencies, deterministic behavior under load
Nice To Haves
- Experience with real-time or safety-critical systems where latency guarantees and failure modes have physical consequences
- Familiarity with lock-free data structures, memory pools, and shared-memory IPC patterns
- Experience with cross-compilation toolchains and embedded Linux targets
- Background in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other physical systems
Responsibilities
- Own and continuously improve real-time C++ infrastructure: sensor pipelines, motor control interfaces, deterministic scheduling such that dependent teams can build on it without hitting foundational performance or reliability blockers
- Establish performance as a measurable standard: deliver benchmarking, flamegraph tooling, and regression tracking that catches latency or throughput drift before it reaches production
- Build the IPC and serialization layer connecting perception, planning, and actuation: lock-free queues, memory pools, shared-memory buffers with clean interfaces that other engineers trust and build on
- Ship foundational libraries that run reliably on thousands of robots in homes and warehouses, not just prototypes in the lab
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
Education Level
No Education Listed
