1X Technologies
Senior to Staff Gameplay Engineer
San Carlos, CA · Staff+
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$3,149 more — $193,149 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $193,149 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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About the role
- If you've built believable NPCs, conversational AI systems, or complex gameplay engine systems, you'll find many of the same engineering challenges here-except the characters are real.
- Your work will bridge the gap between game AI and embodied intelligence, creating robots that behave as naturally and reliably as the best NPCs in modern games.
- Improve the realism, robustness, and adaptability of robot behaviors while establishing engineering best practices for large-scale behavior development.
Responsibilities
- We're building humanoid robots that work in home - doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back.
- NEO is our flagship - a home robot designed to move, learn, and operate in the real world alongside real people.
- 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.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Game Development, Robotics, AI, or a related technical field.
- Strong proficiency in C++, system programming, and object-oriented software design.
- Experience working with Unreal Engine, Unity, proprietary game engines, or large-scale simulation environments.
- Experience implementing behavior trees, GOAP, hierarchical state machines, planners, or similar AI architectures under tight performance constraints.
Skills
- Familiarity with robotics, autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, or embodied AI.
- Experience with navigation systems, pathfinding, task scheduling, perception systems, or world modeling.
Compensation
- 190,000 - $280,000 + Equity
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Generous paid time off, company holidays, and parental leave
- Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) options
- Commuter benefits (transit and parking)
- Short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental health, financial, and personal support
Company info
- Design and implement scalable behavior architectures that enable robots to autonomously perform complex, multi-step household tasks leveraging cloud-based world models.
- Build decision-making frameworks using behavior trees, hierarchical state machines, or similar AI architectures.
- Partner with Core, World Model, Apps, and Motion teams to integrate behavior systems into real-world robot operation.
- Deep expertise building gameplay systems, conversational AI, or NPC behaviors for complex interactive environments.
- Strong understanding of decision-making architectures, planning systems, and autonomous agent behaviors.
- Excellent software engineering skills with experience building scalable, performance-critical systems in C++.
- Strong systems thinking with the ability to simplify complex autonomous behaviors into maintainable software architectures.
- Comfortable leading technical initiatives and collaborating across multidisciplinary engineering teams in a fast-moving environment.
- 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.
Equal opportunity
- 1X is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
- All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, medical condition, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status, justice system impact, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.
Visa & Work Authorization
- rd to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, medical condition, genetic information, disability, military or ve
This listing is sourced directly from 1X Technologies's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.