Research Engineer, Simulation

Targeted start date: Immediately. Relocation provided.

We are 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. As we transition from R&D to full-scale manufacturing, we seek an experienced Research Engineer, Simulation.

Research Engineers in simulation are generalists who build the simulation stack and close the sim-to-real gap. A typical day involves building contact-rich physics simulation, scaling up reinforcement learning algorithms, or solving the sim-to-real gap in the visual or physics domains. You will own simulation and focus on making simulation as widely used as possible within the company. By making simulation a trusted proxy of the real world, you will drive AI model evaluation and iteration speed. You will work closely with other AI team members and also develop independently.

Why this job is exciting

• Your role on the team will be to build ML robotics simulation and close the sim-to-real gap

• You will work across the AI stack and solve gaps in model training and inference

• We aim to (1) double the number of tasks the robot can perform and (2) half the error rate on existing tasks, quarter over quarter

• The team works closely together to prioritize direction and scale up a single approach to a production-ready system

Responsibilities

• Day to day: ship AI stack for non-technical robot operators, scale up AI model training workloads, and own model inference reliability

• Bring real-world tasks and projects into simulation via real-to-sim

• Build the data engine (frontend UI and backend) to log, clean, and label data for foundation model training

• Work with our robot operations team to scale up our datasets and model capabilities

Requirements

Must-Haves

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

• 3+ years of professional, full-time experience building simulation

• Experience with physical simulators (Pybullet, IssacSim, Mujoco, etc.) and training policies in simulation

• Experience with physics simulation (contact dynamics, system identification, physics engines)

• Experience learning-based approaches to close the sim-to-real gap (domain adaptation, randomization)

• Experience generating simulated assets and environments (Blender, Maya)

• Ability to rapidly prototype ideas in code in an independent manner

• Published research in top Simulation or ML conferences (SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, CoRL, RSS, etc.)

Nice-to-haves 

• Experience with high-fidelity, real-time rendering

• Experience with GPU simulation

• Have built large programming projects on your own for fun (e.g. open source projects)

• Training large-scale ML models such as visual foundation models, large language models, pixel-level generative models

• Have implemented highly performant software

Compensation

We offer a total compensation package including base salary from US$105,000 to US$250,000 annually, with generous stock options and other benefits.

We seek the world's most talented individuals with a passion for inventing and building a more prosperous future. At 1X you'll get to own real projects and be rewarded for your achievements and output. We hire, recognize and reward based on merit. We believe the best work is done when collaborating and therefore require in-person presence.

Typical interview process

• Introductions - interviews to learn more about you and talk about 1X and the role

  • Interview with a member of the Talent Acquisition team

  • Hiring manager / senior team member / technical interview

• Team interviews - technical interviews and deep-dives with team members. May include a take home challenge, presentation or problem-solving exercise

  • Technical deep-di