Materials Scientist, Polymers
- Compensation
- $200K–$248K / yr
- Location
- San Carlos, CA
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Science
- Posted
Skills
Nice to have
- PhD in chemistry, polymer science/engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, polymer physics, or an MS of similar background with 5+ years of relevant industry experience
- Experience with high-performance fibers and ropes for actuation or load bearing.
- Experience building or modifying lab and pilot-scale processing lines.
- Experience developing coatings, surface treatments, or sizings for fibers, ropes, or composites.
- Experience scaling materials from the lab to pilot or high-volume manufacturing.
- Experience working with suppliers and documenting inventions and patents.
- Demonstrated ability to design and deliver highly innovative solutions.
Full description
About 1X
1X builds humanoid robots for the home that take on chores and everyday tasks, giving people back their time. That is harder than it sounds: it means advancing robotics, AI, and manufacturing at the same time, at scale, in a machine safe enough to live with a family. We have been working on this since 2014. We believe the hardest research is behind us and the hardest execution is ahead.
Our flagship product, NEO, is a home robot built to move, learn, and work alongside people, and it is shipping, not just demoing. If you want to see important work reach the public, join us as we work to safely create broad abundance.
About the Team
The Materials Science team develops the polymers, fibers, elastomers, adhesives, coatings, and functional materials that determine how durable, efficient, safe, and manufacturable our robots are. We move quickly from the lab into robot systems and work closely with mechanical, electrical, manufacturing, and systems engineers.
Your Charter
Lead polymer-chemistry and polymer-physics R&D on novel tendon materials, protective coatings, and load-bearing composites for humanoid robots. You will work alongside engineers to invent and evaluate new tendon approaches, develop the coatings and jackets that protect them, build and run the equipment used to make high-performance polymers and fibers, characterize what you make, and carry the best candidates into production. Focus areas include strength and stiffness, creep, flex and bend-over-sheave fatigue, adhesion, abrasion, friction, and long-term aging.
Key Outcomes
- Develop novel tendon materials and architectures that outperform current solutions in strength, creep resistance, and fatigue life.
- Develop polymer coatings and jackets for tendons, fibers, and load-bearing composites that improve adhesion, abrasion and wear resistance, friction, and flex durability.
- Set up and operate processing equipment to make high-performance materials in-house, such as twin-screw extrusion and compounding, compression molding, coating lines, fiber spinning and drawing, and lab-scale polymerization reactors.
- Connect chemistry, processing, and polymer physics to measured tendon performance, and build structure-process-property-performance models that guide design decisions.
- Characterize materials, coatings, and tendon constructs using tensile, creep and stress-relaxation, cyclic and flex fatigue, abrasion, adhesion, DMA, DSC, TGA, FTIR, rheology, and microscopy.
- Investigate rope, coating, and composite failures, identify root causes, and implement chemistry- and physics-driven fixes.
- Establish lab procedures, test methods, and documentation that support manufacturing readiness, supplier transfer, and IP development.