Staff Systems Engineer - Network

About the role

ABOUT 1X

We're building humanoid robots that work in home - doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back. Simple, but it's 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 you're inspired by this, you'll thrive here. We've been at this since 2014 and we're 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. We're not demoing it - we're shipping it. We're excited to meet you, if this excites you.

If you've spent your career working on problems that matter and want to see them actually reach the world - this is that moment. We're scaling, we're 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 C++ infrastructure that NEO's entire stack runs on - sensor pipelines, motor control interfaces, networking, inter-process communication, and the foundational libraries that ship on every robot. Our code runs thousands of times per second on hardware moving through the real world, and its correctness and performance directly determine 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 design and execution of all networking systems on the core robot, working with our Cloud Infra and Apps teams to ensure we can scale robot operations end-to-end from fleet management to real-time VR teleop. This is critical-path work: as 1X scales from hundreds to tens of thousands of robots, the reliability, performance, and simplicity of networking is a critical piece of successful deployments. You will lead architecture decisions, build core components, and set technical standards for the team.

Key Outcomes:

- Own the core networking systems for robots and design topologies that maximize QoS for peer-to-peer, peer-to-server, and one-to-many.

- Design and implement load balancing strategies that maximize network utilization.

- Manage seamless connectivity across multiple networks (eg wifi, 5G)

- Build APIs & protocols that transmit multi-model data at scale, including high-bandwidth video

Key Competencies:

- Deep understanding of network topology design for peer-to-peer, peer-to-server, and one-to-many multicast

- Load balancing and resource management on both client and server

- Experience architecting systems that support network transitions and degraded connectivity

- Protocol design for high-bandwidth high-QoS multimodal payloads

- End-to-end system thinking across hardware, embedded, network stack, and cloud including QoS design (e.g. traffic classes, scheduling, and budgeting).