Staff Systems Engineer - Camera

1X•San Carlos, CA

13h

About The Position

1X is building NEO, a humanoid robot designed to operate in homes alongside people. The Core team owns the C++ infrastructure that supports NEO’s stack, including sensor pipelines, motor-control interfaces, networking, inter-process communication, and foundational libraries. This role owns the camera stack, from selecting sensors and lenses through delivering calibrated, rectified frames to perception models. The work spans camera selection and vendor engagement, hardware bring-up, production image pipelines, and calibration on the manufacturing line and across deployed robots. The camera system must meet latency and synchronization requirements, maintain image quality for perception in real-world lighting, and support reliable production and fleet monitoring.

Requirements

At least 5 years shipping camera or imaging software in production systems such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, consumer devices, or AR/VR.
Hands-on experience bringing up image sensors on embedded Linux, including V4L2, MIPI CSI-2, and associated driver and device-tree work.
Demonstrated experience with camera intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, including validating calibration quality rather than relying solely on solver output.
Strong C++ skills in performance-critical systems, with profiling and debugging experience.
Understanding of camera sensors, optics, and ISP as an integrated system, and of image flow through a robotics stack.
Experience debugging hardware interfaces such as MIPI CSI-2, serializer/deserializer links, I2C, and PoE, as well as power and clock sequencing.
Ability to reason about calibration measurement, error, tolerances, uncertainty, and how calibration errors affect perception.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ISP tuning and image-quality evaluation for perception-model consumers.
Experience bringing calibration into manufacturing, including fixture and station design, cycle time, yield, and build-data failure analysis.
Familiarity with CUDA or GPU image processing and zero-copy image transport between processes.
Background in multi-camera synchronization, stereo rectification, or camera-IMU time alignment.

Responsibilities

Define camera sensor, lens, and module requirements with hardware and perception teams; run trade studies, engage vendors, and bring selected hardware up on real systems.
Develop and maintain a production-ready camera pipeline, including sensor drivers, multi-camera synchronization and timestamping, and frame delivery that meets latency requirements without dropping frames or destabilizing timestamps.
Tune exposure, white balance, and dynamic range for perception models in real-world home lighting, including low light and strong backlight.
Develop production-line intrinsic and extrinsic calibration processes that fit within cycle time, automatically validate results, monitor fleet drift, and support recovery in the field.
Debug camera systems across hardware interfaces and the image pipeline, from capture through transport, compression, and transformation to model consumption.
Design calibration and diagnostics for manufacturing at volume and for robots operating in homes.
Profile and debug performance-critical C++ systems to identify frame loss and latency bottlenecks.

Benefits

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
Generous paid time off
Company holidays
Parental leave
401(k) plan with company match
Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options
Health Savings Account (HSA) options
Commuter benefits for transit and parking
Short-term disability insurance
Long-term disability insurance
Life insurance
Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental health, financial, and personal support
Onsite snacks and catered lunches
Equity