Tech Lead, Companion

1X Technologies AS • Palo Alto, CA

19d

About The Position

About the Role
NEO is a home robot that handles chores and provides personalized assistance. Companion Mode is how people actually live with NEO: natural voice interaction, contextual help based on what NEO sees, and a personality that belongs in your home.
As Tech Lead, you own the end-to-end Companion experience. You'll lead a small, senior team of engineers and HRI designers, stay hands-on, and ship consistently.
This role is critical to scaling NEO as a product - it is the customer’s first impression of NEO and 1X and is one of the highest impact roles at the company.

Requirements

• Have 5+ years building user-facing products that must work every day: consumer hardware, robotics, AR/VR, voice assistants, or similarly unforgiving domains.
• Have hands-on experience with speech ML (ASR, TTS, emotion detection, speaker diarization, or multimodal input) and understand latency/quality tradeoffs at a systems level.
• Are familiar with Python and/or C++ and writing and deploying code across different environments.
• Understand full-stack product development, from Docker deployment to Python prototyping with LiveKit.
• Have strong product taste: you can look at an interaction and know whether it will delight or confuse, and you back it up with data and iteration.

Responsibilities

• Own Companion Mode architecture, execution, and delivery across the full user journey: multimodal social perception, robot behavior, feedback, and memory.
• Build context into interaction by fusing perception, spatial understanding, and memory so NEO can provide relevant, personalized help.
• Lead a cross-functional pod and set research direction and make taste choices.
• Interface with the rest of NEO (autonomy, teleop workflows, app surfaces, on-robot systems) to make Companion a cohesive experience.
• Build and deploy production speech models (ASR, TTS, and/or Speech to Speech).
• Own the full pipeline from data collection and model training through deployment and monitoring.
• Solve hard acoustic problems that come with putting a robot in someone's living room: far-field recognition, noise robustness, barge-in handling, and multi-speaker environments.
• Design voice interaction that feels human: natural prosody, appropriate turn-taking, responses that match context and emotional tone.
• Build evaluation infrastructure, define quality metrics that actually correlate with user experience, and use real-world feedback to prioritize improvements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed