Staff Firmware Engineer - Motor Controls (Equity)

1x.tech; San Carlos (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary range + Equity

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off

Job summary

1X is hiring an experienced embedded firmware engineer to own motor control firmware for BLDC/PMSM actuators in the NEO platform. You will implement FOC, space-vector PWM, and robust sensing interfaces, collaborating with hardware and software teams to push from bench to full robots.

You will optimize control loops, ensure safety with fault detection and STO, and bring up new motor driver boards. Based in California, the role is on-site and offers impact on how humans live with autonomous home

Qualifications

• 5+ years of embedded firmware development in C/C++ (7+ for senior roles).
• Shipped motor control firmware for BLDC or PMSM motors, including FOC and cascaded control loops.
• Solid grasp of motor physics and power electronics: inverters, gate drivers, current sensing, dead time and PWM.
• Experience with encoders and sensor interfaces such as SPI, BiSS-C, SSI or ABZ.
• Hands-on experience with EtherCAT/CAN or another real-time fieldbus.
• Comfort with interrupt-driven, hard real-time code on MCUs such as STM32, TI C2000 or similar.
• Hardware debugging with oscilloscopes, current probes, logic analyzers and dynamometers.

Responsibilities

• Develop motor control firmware for BLDC/PMSM actuators, including field-oriented control (FOC), space-vector PWM, and current, velocity and position loops
• Integrate and calibrate position sensing: absolute and incremental encoders, Hall sensors, commutation offsets and multi-turn tracking
• Tune control loops for high bandwidth, low torque ripple and low acoustic noise, including feedforward, friction and cogging compensation
• Implement torque and impedance control modes that support safe, compliant interaction with people
• Build fault detection and protection for overcurrent, overvoltage, undervoltage, overtemperature, stall and sensor failures, with safe torque-off behavior
• Design motor drive communication with deterministic timing to the central controller
• Bring up new motor driver boards and support hardware design reviews for gate drivers, current sensing and power stages
• Test and validate firmware releases on the bench and on full robots, and build tools for automated tuning, logging and regression testing

Skills

Embedded firmware in C/C++

Motor control concepts

Debugging skills

Cross-functional communication

Tools

EtherCAT/CAN

SPI

BiSS-C

SSI

ABZ

Job description

1X is hiring an experienced embedded firmware engineer to own motor control firmware for BLDC/PMSM actuators in the NEO platform. You will implement FOC, space-vector PWM, and robust sensing interfaces, collaborating with hardware and software teams to push from bench to full robots.

You will optimize control loops, ensure safety with fault detection and STO, and bring up new motor driver boards. Based in California, the role is on-site and offers impact on how humans live with autonomous home