1X Technologies Names Tom Sanocki VP of Engineering to Guide NEO Consumer and Developer Roadmap

Key Takeaways

Hide

• 1X Technologies has appointed former Pixar, Bungie, and Roblox executive Tom Sanocki as its new Vice President of Engineering.
• Sanocki will oversee the company's software roadmap as 1X prepares for its inaugural consumer shipments and builds out its recently announced open developer ecosystem.
• The high-profile hire follows a massive structural reshuffle at 1X, including the launch of a dedicated World Model Lab to replace departing legacy AI leadership.
• Sanocki’s deep background in real-time graphics, avatar platforms, and user-facing systems at scale will be critical in transitioning the NEO humanoid robot from prototypes into production-grade consumer products.

As the race to place humanoid robots in domestic and research environments intensifies, 1X Technologies is aggressively reinforcing its technical leadership. The Norwegian-American robotics firm announced on June 25, 2026, the appointment of Tom Sanocki as its new Vice President of Engineering. Sanocki will be tasked with directing the company’s software organization as it navigates a critical transitional pivot from research prototyping to high-volume commercial deployment.

The appointment comes at a high-stakes juncture for 1X. The company is currently racing to meet its late-2026 delivery window for the consumer version of its $20,000 NEO humanoid, while simultaneously scaling manufacturing infrastructure at its 58,000-square-foot "NEO Factory" in Hayward, California.

A Pedigree in Real-Time Systems and Scale

Sanocki joins 1X with a decades-long track record of engineering complex, real-time, user-facing systems across both entertainment and mass-market consumer platforms. He previously served as the first Engineering Director for Avatars at Roblox and led four separate engineering teams on Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Earlier in his career, after earning a Computer Science Engineering degree from Princeton University, Sanocki spent years at Pixar contributing to foundational animated films such as Finding Nemo, Cars, Brave, and Up, followed by engineering contributions to Bungie's Destiny franchise.

According to 1X leadership, this specialized expertise in real-time systems, graphics, user-generated content platforms, and character simulation represents the precise technical foundation required to guide the NEO platform into the real world.

"Tom joining 1X is a milestone for the company," said Bernt Børnich, CEO and Founder of 1X Technologies. "His expertise in graphics, real-time systems, machine learning, and character platforms is world-class, and exactly what we need to accelerate our software roadmap as we move from prototypes to products that leave the factory and land on doorsteps."

Powering a Rebuilt AI Ecosystem

Sanocki’s arrival coincides with a profound ideological and structural reorganization within 1X’s artificial intelligence division. Earlier this month, the company executed a hard reset on its software approach, shifting away from standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures to launch the 1X World Model Lab under new leadership. This structural shift followed the high-profile exodus of legacy AI executives, including former VP of AI Eric Jang and Director of Evaluations Daniel Ho.

While the World Model Lab focuses on pretraining the generative "cognitive core" that allows NEO to imagine physical tasks before executing them, Sanocki will be responsible for the overarching engineering execution required to make these massive models performant at the edge. 1X relies on an on-board "NEO Cortex" powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor hardware to execute safety-critical perception and real-time inference. Sanocki's background in optimizing highly complex simulation environments will likely be critical in closing the "reactivity gap"—the latency bottleneck that historically requires multi-GPU clusters seconds of compute to generate brief windows of real-time robotic action.

Bringing the Developer Platform to Life

Beyond consumer hardware shipments, Sanocki will play a pivotal role in executing 1X’s sudden geopolitical pivot. Just one day prior to Sanocki’s hiring announcement, Børnich revealed that 1X would accelerate the release of an open NEO developer platform. The strategic move was designed to provide Western AI research laboratories with a politically insulated, domestic hardware alternative following threatened U.S. congressional bans on low-cost Chinese humanoids like Unitree.

Sanocki will be charged with transforming NEO’s underlying software stack into a robust, developer-friendly ecosystem. The objective is to empower independent engineers, academic labs, and third-party startups to build applications natively on top of NEO’s passively safe, tendon-driven hardware architecture.

"The 1X team is solving the hardest problems for a truly general purpose consumer robot and doing it right now," Sanocki said in a statement. "Their commitment to safety and human values is exactly what we need, and I’m excited to join the team as we begin shipping the first humanoid robots to everyday people."

By pairing Sanocki’s deep expertise in large-scale interactive platforms with 1X's aggressive physical manufacturing expansion, the company is attempting to prove that its data-driven humanoid strategy can scale sustainably. Whether Sanocki can successfully bridge the gap between virtual world avatars and the unstructured chaos of human living rooms remains the ultimate question as the 2026 delivery timeline looms.