Staff Systems Engineer - Camera

About 1X

Were building humanoid robots that work in home - doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back. Simple, but its not.

To do this right, we have to solve robotics, AI, manufacturing - at the same time, at scale, in a form factor that has to be safe enough to live with your family. If youre inspired by this, youll thrive here. Weve been at this since 2014 and were at the point where the hard problems are behind us and the hard work is in front of us.

NEO is our flagship - a home robot designed to move, learn, and operate in the real world alongside real people. Were not demoing it - were shipping it. Were excited to meet you, if this excites you.

If youve spent your career working on problems that matter and want to see them actually reach the world - this is that moment. Were scaling, were hiring with intention, and we need people who want to build something that will genuinely change how humans spend their time - safely creating abundance for all.

About the Team

The Core team builds and owns the core C++ infrastructure that NEO's entire stack runs on, from sensor pipelines, motor control interfaces, networking, inter-process communication, and the foundational libraries that ship on every robot. Our code executes thousands of times per second on hardware moving through the real world, and its correctness and performance directly determines what every other team can build and ship. If you want to work on the systems layer that makes physical AI possible at scale, this is that team.

Your Charter

Own the camera stack NEO sees through, from the sensor and lens selected for the robot to the calibrated, rectified frames every perception model consumes. This is critical-path work: no vision model is better than the images it is handed, and nothing downstream survives a camera that is miscalibrated, badly tuned, or quietly dropping frames. You will own that path from vendor selection through end-of-line calibration on the production line and out to robots already working in homes.

Key Outcomes

• Own camera selection end to end: define sensor, lens, and module requirements with the hardware and perception teams, run the trade studies, and carry a choice through vendor engagement and bring-up on real hardware

• Deliver a camera pipeline that holds up in production: sensor drivers, multi-camera synchronization and timestamping, and frame delivery that meets its latency budget without dropping frames or destabilizing timestamps

• Tune the image path for machines rather than for people: exposure, white balance, and dynamic range chosen so perception models are accurate in real homes, including the low light and hard backlight a living room actually presents

• Make calibration a production process, not a lab procedure: intrinsics and extrinsics calibrated on the line inside cycle time, validated automatically, monitored for drift across the fleet, and recoverable in the field

Key Competencies

• Camera systems depth understanding sensors, optics, and ISP as one system, and how an image travels a robotics stack from capture through transport, compression, and transformation to the model that consumes it

• Lives at the hardware boundary debugging across MIPI CSI-2, serdes links, I2C, PoE, and power and clock sequencing, and treating dropped frames, timestamp instability, and bandwidth limits as everyday failure modes rather than mysteries

• Calibration rigor treating calibration as measurement with error bars, reasoning about tolerances and uncertainty, and knowing how a calibration error propagates into what a perception model gets wrong

• Thinks in fleets, not units designing calibration and diagnostics that survive a production line at volume and robots already in homes, not just a bench with a careful operator

Minimum Requirements

• 5+ years shipping camera or imaging software in production systems: robotics, autonomous vehicles, consumer devices, or AR and VR

• Hands-on experience bringing up image sensors on embedded Linux, including V4L2, MIPI CSI-2, and the driver and device tree work that comes with it

• Demonstrated experience with camera intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, including validating calibration quality rather than trusting a solvers output

• Strong C++ in performance-critical systems, with the profiling and debugging habits to find where frames and milliseconds actually go

Preferred Skills

• Experience with ISP tuning and image quality evaluation, especially where the consumer is a perception model rather than a person

• Experience taking calibration into manufacturing: fixture and station design, cycle time, yield, and failure analysis on build data

• 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

What does a successful 1X Team Member look like

Team members at 1X who thrive here are builders. They move fast, own their work completely, and treat time like its the one thing you cant get back - because it is. They say what they mean, finish what they start, and hold themselves to a standard before anyone has to ask. We push each other to be better, and we do it with honesty and respect.

Compensation

$230K - $285K Base + Equity

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

Equal Opportunity Employer

1X is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, medical condition, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status, justice system impact, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.