Chef Robotics
Staff Autonomy Engineer
TLDR
Own the technical architecture and hands-on development of Chef's autonomy stack, impacting food robotics production and leveraging advanced learning-based systems.
Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food. We build AI-powered robots that assemble fresh meals at scale for some of the largest food producers in North America — companies making ready-to-eat meals for airlines, retailers, meal kits, and the frozen food aisle.
Our robots operate in high-mix, high-variability production environments where ingredients change shape, color, and consistency from one tray to the next. Solving this requires tightly coupled perception, manipulation, and learning — and a team that ships hardware-software systems into customer facilities and keeps them running.
Headquartered in San Francisco, we are a venture-backed team of robotics, ML, and operations engineers building the foundation for general-purpose food robotics.
In this role, you will:
Own the end-to-end architecture and hands-on development of Chef's autonomy stack — perception, action prediction, closed-loop control, and sensor fusion — from prototype through production deployment
Design and implement learning-based systems that predict and execute robot actions from visual and operational observations, generalizing across diverse ingredient types with minimal per-item tuning
Build closed-loop control systems that integrate vision, weight feedback, force-torque sensing, and trajectory planning for robust real-world manipulation
Develop rapid onboarding capabilities — algorithms and tooling that enable new meal types and ingredient configurations to be deployed quickly from minimal demonstrations
Instrument autonomy systems for production monitoring, failure detection, and continuous improvement; build data collection pipelines that feed back into model retraining
Define objective qualification criteria for autonomy subsystems; drive reliability and performance improvements using production data across the deployed fleet
Investigate and integrate the latest advances in robot learning, foundation models, and manipulation research — continuously evaluating what's ready to move from research into production
Mentor senior engineers, lead design reviews, and help build a team capable of scaling Chef's autonomy stack to hundreds of deployed systems
What You Bring:
Demonstrated experience shipping a complete autonomy or manipulation system to real-world deployment — not just simulation or research prototypes
Deep technical expertise across at least two of: perception systems, visuomotor control, action prediction, sensor fusion, or motion planning
Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python and C++; experience building production-quality, maintainable systems across research and deployment codebases
Track record of technical leadership: driving architecture decisions, leading cross-functional projects, and raising the engineering bar on a team
Comfort with ambiguity and urgency — able to set direction and execute in a fast-moving startup environment
Nice-to-have:
Experience with food, agricultural, or consumer goods robotics where object variability is high
Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch preferred) and the full model lifecycle — training, evaluation, deployment, and field iteration
Familiarity with foundation model approaches for manipulation: diffusion policies, VLAs, world models, JEPA-style architectures
Background in sim-to-real transfer, domain randomization, or synthetic data generation for manipulation
Experience with ROS and real-time robotics middleware
Prior startup technical leadership experience
Chef Robotics develops intelligent robots designed to automate tasks in commercial kitchens, targeting the food industry. By focusing on food automation, we aim to revolutionize how kitchens operate, making them more efficient and scalable.