About the role
About 1X
1X builds humanoid robots designed to work alongside people in real-world settings. Our flagship robot, NEO, is developed to adapt to its environment, learn from daily interactions, and support humans at home and in the workplace. The team focuses on advancing NEO’s cognitive and sensory abilities for greater reliability and efficiency.
Role Overview
This C++ Systems Engineer - Foundations role is based on-site in San Carlos, California. The engineer will own core C++ infrastructure for robotic systems, including sensor data pipelines, motor control, and inter-process communication. The work directly shapes robot performance in live deployments, where code runs at high frequency on physical hardware.
What You Will Do
- Design and implement low-latency, high-throughput systems in modern C++ for hardware with limited resources.
- Manage real-time infrastructure such as sensor fusion pipelines, motor control interfaces, deterministic scheduling, and shared core libraries used across all robotic platforms.
- Develop inter-process communication and serialization layers to connect perception, planning, and actuation. This includes lock-free queues, memory pools, shared-memory buffers, and high-rate logging for reliable data flow.
- Make performance a priority by building microbenchmarks, using flamegraphs, tracking regressions, and developing tools to observe system behavior under load.
- Troubleshoot complex issues across the stack, including toolchain or ABI mismatches, linking errors, kernel interfaces, cross-compilation, and hardware-specific performance problems.
- Promote reliability through predictable system behavior, clear failure modes, and well-defined interfaces that support other engineering teams.
- Deliver production-quality code that runs on thousands of robots in real homes and warehouses, not just in lab prototypes.
Who We’re Looking For
- At least 5 years of hands-on experience with production C++ in performance-critical domains such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, high-frequency trading, game engines, operating systems, compilers, or high-performance computing.
- Strong grasp of system fundamentals: cycles, cache lines, latency, memory, bandwidth, and startup time. Designs systems that stay efficient under heavy load.
- Comfortable in Unix or Linux environments, using shells, GNU tools, and following Unix principles.
- Experience building and shipping real-time systems where reliability matters and failures have real consequences.
- Proficient with systems-level debugging: benchmarking, profiling, tracing, reading assembly, and working with Linux kernel interfaces.
- Writes maintainable code with clear interfaces, minimal dependencies, and an emphasis on correctness so others can build on their work.

