Tactile Sensing Researcher​/Engineer

Overview

As a Tactile Sensing Researcher / Engineer on the 1X Labs team, your role is to push tactile sensing toward human-level performance by developing sensing systems that capture the structure and dynamics of physical contact, not just detecting touch. You will take a promising tactile sensing technology and drive it forward through repeated cycles of design, fabrication, and testing. This is not a sensor-integration role.

You are expected to extend the underlying technology itself—by understanding its physical limits, removing bottlenecks, and systematically improving performance.

Biological touch serves as the reference system. You study it to extract concrete performance targets—spatial and temporal resolution, dynamic range, compliance coupling, robustness—and use those targets to guide engineering decisions. The goal is not biological imitation, but convergence at the level of functional performance. You operate end-to-end: from materials and structures at the contact interface, through transduction mechanisms and electronics, to full sensor prototypes tested under realistic contact conditions.

Progress is measured in what the system can now sense, resolve, and withstand compared to before.

• Design, fabricate, and iterate tactile sensing hardware across multiple generations.

• Develop and refine sensor structures, materials interfaces, and transduction mechanisms.

• Build experimental setups to characterize tactile sensors under realistic loading, motion, and contact conditions.

• Quantitatively evaluate performance limits and identify dominant failure modes.

• Drive sustained performance improvements toward human-level tactile capability.

• Work closely with actuation, materials, and control teams to ensure tactile sensing meaningfully supports dexterous manipulation and interaction.

• PhD in robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, bioengineering, or a closely related field.

• Demonstrated, high-impact contributions to tactile sensing or closely related sensing technologies.

• This may include widely cited publications, patented systems, or deployed sensing hardware.

• Proven ability to take a sensing concept from early prototype through multiple, materially improved iterations.

• Strong hands-on experience fabricating, assembling, and testing physical sensing systems.

• Track record of identifying and overcoming fundamental performance limits rather than working around them.

• Clear evidence of work that moved the state of the art forward, not just evaluated existing approaches.

• Hands-on experience with soft or compliant materials in sensing applications.

• Prior work on tactile sensing.