Software Engineer, Backend (Martin) 1x San Francisco, CA Palo Alto, CA

About this role

Software Engineer, Backend (Martin)

Company : 1x

Location : San Francisco, CA · Palo Alto, CA

Senior / Principal Backend Engineer, Cloud Platform

1X · San Carlos, CA · On-site · Full time

$200K – $300K + equity · Relocation available

About 1X

1X builds humanoid robots for the home. NEO is our flagship. It moves, learns and works alongside real people, and we’re shipping it, not demoing it. We’ve been at this since 2014. The hard research problems are behind us. The hard work of getting robots out the door is in front of us.

The role

You’ll join a small backend team, currently two engineers and growing to about nine. This team owns the software that connects 1X’s robots to the cloud: fleet backends, real-time control, data pipelines, customer-facing control interfaces and internal operations platforms. As we scale from hundreds of robots to tens of thousands, this layer decides whether the business can operate.

This isn’t one project. There’s an endless list of work standing between us and shipped robots. Every morning you’ll ask what the most important thing you can do is, and then you’ll do it. Priorities move fast. We always have a plan, and it changes often.

You’ll also help set how the whole company uses the cloud. Our goal is for every engineering team to have someone who knows AWS deeply. You’ll be setting that standard.

What you’ll do

• Design and ship backend systems on AWS for fleet management, real-time robot control, data pipelines and monitoring.
• Write production code every day. This is a hands-on seat, not an architecture-only role.
• Own problems end to end, from the first conversation with the team that has the problem to the system running in production.
• Treat other teams as your customers. Find the right people, learn what they need and build the solution.
• Set reliability and performance standards, review critical code and help other teams use the cloud well.
• Pick up frontend work when it’s needed. AI coding tools make that manageable for a backend engineer.

What you bring

• Deep AWS expertise. Ideally you were a senior or principal engineer on an AWS service team for 3 to 5 years.
• Experience outside your largest employer, including at least one startup. You know how to work without a playbook.
• System design maturity. You think through failure modes, consistency and scale before you build, and you keep systems simple as they grow.
• A generalist’s range. You care more about what moves the company forward than about which project builds your résumé.
• Strong people skills. You can walk into an unfamiliar part of the org, find who you need, learn their problem and solve it.
• A modern workflow. You use AI agents to write code, and you know what good code looks like and how to judge it.
• Robotics, IoT or real-time systems experience is a plus, not a requirement.

Interview process

• A 30-minute virtual screen with the hiring manager
• An onsite loop in San Carlos, covering AWS system design and a whiteboard session focused on how you think, not how fast you type

Internal calibration notes (do not post)

Who Martin is looking for

• Strongest profile: a senior or principal engineer on an AWS service team for 3 to 5 years, now at a startup or another company. He thinks Seattle is the richest pool, and he sees relocating from there as easy.
• No company is off limits, and industry doesn’t matter.

Who to avoid

• No Amazon lifers.
• He’s skeptical of anyone with a long tenure at Meta or Google. Short stints there followed by other work are fine.

Disqualifiers

• Candidates who need a defined charter or ask what’s in it for their career.
• A former AWS principal who expects to set direction for hundreds of engineers. This seat writes code.