Staff Autonomy Engineer
Chef RoboticsAbout the role
Chef Robotics is bringing AI into the physical world, starting with one of the world’s largest industries: food manufacturing.
Food production faces one of the most severe labor shortages in the US, with more than 1 million open jobs today and demand continuing to grow. Our robots help manufacturers automate repetitive food-preparation and assembly tasks so they can increase throughput, improve consistency, and keep production onshore.
Today, Chef robots operate in production facilities across North America and Europe, serving customers including Amy’s Kitchen, gategroup, and CookUnity. Our robots have made over 100 million servings in production, creating the world’s largest proprietary dataset for AI-powered manipulation of deformable food. Every meal our robots produce makes the system smarter.
Backed by leading investors including Avataar Ventures, Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins, we’re scaling rapidly with a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model and long-term customer partnerships. Our team includes engineers and leaders from Google, Cruise, Tesla, Amazon Robotics, Dexterity, Bear Robotics, Saildrone, and Zoox, united by a mission to build intelligent machines that solve meaningful problems in the real world.
If you’re excited about solving hard problems, creating real customer impact, and shipping systems that operate in production every day, not just in the lab, you’ll feel at home at Chef.
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-s
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