1X Technologies
Staff Firmware Engineer - Motor Controls
$200K–$300K
San Carlos, CA · On-site · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jun 17, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years; 7+ years for senior roles.
About the job
Develop and maintain safe, reliable motor-control firmware for NEO’s robotic joints, from control-loop implementation and hardware bring-up to testing and validation.
What you'll do
- Develop BLDC/PMSM motor-control firmware, including FOC, sensing integration, and torque or impedance control.
- Implement motor-drive fault detection, protection, and deterministic communication with the central controller.
- Bring up motor-driver boards and validate firmware on benches and robots, including automated tuning and regression tools.
What they ask for
- 5+ years of embedded firmware development in C/C++ (7+ for senior roles).
- Shipped BLDC or PMSM motor-control firmware, including FOC and cascaded control loops.
- Knowledge of motor physics and power electronics, including inverters, gate drivers, current sensing, dead time, and PWM.
- Experience with encoders and sensor interfaces, EtherCAT/CAN or another real-time fieldbus, and interrupt-driven hard real-time MCU code.
Nice to have
- Experience with robotic joints, quasi-direct-drive or high-ratio geared actuators, sensorless control, field weakening, or motor parameter identification.
- Experience with safety-critical systems or standards, real-time operating systems, or controller modeling and simulation.
Pay
$200,000 – $300,000 USD base salary
Tools
C/C++, BLDC, PMSM, FOC, SPI, BiSS-C, SSI, ABZ
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative