Body Language Engineer, AI Companion

About 1X
We’re an AI and robotics company based in Palo Alto, California, on a mission to build a truly abundant society through general‑purpose robots capable of performing any kind of work autonomously.
We believe that to truly understand the world and grow in intelligence, humanoid robots must live and learn alongside us. That’s why we’re focused on developing friendly home robots designed to integrate seamlessly into everyday life.
We’re looking for curious, driven, and passionate people who want to help shape the future of robotics and AI. If this mission excites you, we’d be thrilled to hear from you and explore how you might contribute to our journey.

Role Overview

The AI Companion team creates the speech interface to NEO, as well as the physical awareness behaviors that evokes trust, warmth, and competence. 

As a Body Language Engineer on the AI Companion Team, you will train NEO to produce body language and respond to users’ body language via video understanding. You will define architectures, lead projects from research through to production, and contribute to creating the magical human‑robot interaction experience through both verbal and non‑verbal communication. 

You will work closely with the design team to reflect NEO’s personality and 1X’s brand values in the way NEO behaves around users, as well as the autonomy team to create policies capable of communicating with users. 

Responsibilities

• Scale up data collection for nonverbal communication behavior

• Extend real-time speech2speech models with real-time emotive body language

• Design and implement video understanding models for understanding user body language and intent

• Devise methods to blend functional visuomotor tasks (e.g. manipulation) with communication (gesticulation, emotion).