Simulation Engineer - Physics Modeling

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 Simulation team builds the virtual environments and infrastructure that let 1X's AI team iterate on robot learning without being bottlenecked by real hardware. We construct physically realistic simulation worlds for NEO, scale synthetic data production, close the sim-to-real gap, and prototype new hardware virtually before it's manufactured. Our work is a force multiplier for every research and development team at 1X: the faster and more faithfully we can simulate NEO's world, the faster the whole company learns.

YOUR CHARTER

Close the gap between how NEO behaves in simulation and how it behaves in the world. You will make the simulator physically accurate enough that results earned in simulation hold up on hardware, building and validating the dynamics, material, and sensor models that decide whether a simulated result means anything. Every team that trains or evaluates against simulation is betting on the fidelity you deliver.

KEY OUTCOMES

- Physical Accuracy: Improve contact dynamics, articulated body models, and actuator and transmission fidelity, driven by system identification data from real hardware and kept current as hardware changes.

- Compliant and Deformable Bodies: Model soft contact and structural compliance where rigid-body assumptions break down, so grasping and contact-rich behavior transfers instead of only working in simulation.

- Sensing Realism: Model the sensing path as it actually behaves - noise, bias, dropout, latency, and sample timing - so a policy sees in simulation what it will see on the robot.

- Measuring the Gap: Establish the benchmarks and real-robot comparisons that quantify sim-to-real error, so fidelity work is driven by evidence rather than intuition.

- Randomize or Model: Decide which discrepancies to model faithfully and which to randomize over, with ranges grounded in the spread measured across the real fleet.