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Salary: USD 200,000 - 250,000 / annual
1X is building humanoid robots designed to operate safely in homes, handling tasks and chores. The company is shipping its flagship product, NEO, a home robot that moves, learns, and operates in the real world alongside people. 1X Labs is the research division focused on closing the gap between current robotic capabilities and human-level performance through deep research, rigorous experimentation, and rapid iteration.
As a Tactile Sensing Research Engineer, you will advance tactile sensing toward human-level capability by developing sensing systems that capture the structure and dynamics of physical contact. You will take promising tactile sensing technologies through repeated cycles of design, fabrication, testing, and refinement. Your focus will be on understanding fundamental performance limits, eliminating bottlenecks, and systematically improving sensing performance across spatial resolution, temporal response, dynamic range, robustness, and durability.
Key outcomes include delivering successive generations of tactile sensing systems with measurable improvements, establishing rigorous benchmarking methodologies against human tactile capabilities and state-of-the-art sensing technologies, identifying and overcoming fundamental limitations in tactile sensing architectures and materials, generating experimental evidence to guide research decisions, and successfully transitioning promising concepts into viable paths for robotic manipulation integration.
You will work across materials, mechanics, electronics, and system integration challenges with an exceptional hands-on approach to prototyping, fabrication, and testing. The role requires deep technical expertise combined with a relentless commitment to reality—using experiments to settle debates, pushing systems to reveal their true limits, and caring as much about understanding failure as achieving success.
Requirements:
- PhD in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science, Bioengineering, or closely related field
- Demonstrated high-impact contributions to tactile sensing or related sensing technologies through publications, patents, deployed systems, or equivalent technical achievements
- Proven experience developing sensing technologies through multiple generations of design, fabrication, and validation
- Strong hands-on experience building and testing physical sensing systems
- Track record of identifying and overcoming fundamental performance limitations in sensing technologies
Preferred Skills:
- Experience with soft, compliant, or bio-inspired materials in sensing applications
- Custom experimental setup design for sensor characterization and benchmarking
- Familiarity with robotic manipulation, dexterous hands, or human-machine interaction systems
- Custom electronics, transduction systems, or signal-processing pipeline development
- Background in biomechanics, neuroscience, haptics, or biologically inspired sensing
