Research Engineer, Robot Character

Target start date: immediately.  Relocation provided.

Since its founding in 2015, 1X has been at the forefront of developing advanced humanoid robots designed for household use. Our mission is to create an abundant supply of labor via safe, intelligent humanoids. At 1X, you’ll own critical projects, tackle unsolved research problems, deliver great products to customers, and be rewarded based on merit and achievement. 

We are looking for a Research Engineer in Robot Character. In this role, you will imbue NEO with the ability to communicate non-verbally and verbally with humans and make the human-robot user experience magical.

Responsibilities

• Integrate third-party voice assistant software on NEO and synchronize speech with behavior.

• Use RL and Imitation Learning techniques to make NEO a “friendly companion”.

• Integrate social-related predictions with task-related predictions in a cohesive manner

• Getting general-purpose robots to work in the home is just about the hardest problem one can work on. We are looking for people with the courage to tackle unsolved technical challenges with an intense work ethic.

• Thrives in ambiguity

• Immaculate taste in technology product experiences

• Fast learner and able to prototype quickly

• Strong software engineering skills with experience in multi-threading and concurrency

• Experience with imitation learning and reinforcement learning techniques for chatbots

Nice to have

• Experience building real-time conversation agents with audio.

• Experience with 3D animation tools like Maya and Blender.

• Experience with optimizing streaming inference for transformers.

• Robotics and animatronics experience.

Sample Projects

We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification. If you have direct experience in solving one of the “sample projects” listed below, please let us know in your cover letter.

• How would you extend a realtime audio conversation agent to do co-speech gesture generation?

• Motions for nonverbal communication (e.g. emoting) are usually treated separately from task completion behavior (e.g. folding laundry). How would you merge the to together?

• What should NEO’s “idle animation” be? How would you implement this?

Location Policy: We believe the best work is done when collaborating and therefore require in-person presence in our office locations.

Compensation

At 1X your work and results will be rewarded with a total rewards package consisting of a base salary, stock options and benefits. Base salary range is $130,000 to $250,000. Your actual salary will be based on your knowledge, skills and experience.