Chef Robotics
Technology
SeniorMLEngineer,FoundationModels
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“Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models at Chef Robotics. Skills: Foundation Models, Robot learning, MLOps. Define architecture for Food Foundation Model. Define training objectives for Food Foundation Model”
What You'll Achieve.
Serve millions of meals
Industry & Context.
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or related field, 5+ years experience implementing and deploying ML models for robotics, Hands-on experience with large-scale model training, Solid software engineering fundamentals
Nice to Have
Experience with world models or generative models, Familiarity with simulation environments, Experience deploying models to edge hardware, Prior work with contact-rich manipulation, Publications at top venues
What You'll Do.
Define architecture for Food Foundation Model
Define training objectives for Food Foundation Model
Define learning approach for Food Foundation Model
Investigate foundation model architectures
Evaluate foundation model architectures
Assess applicability of models
Design pre-training pipelines
Design fine-tuning pipelines
Design alignment pipelines
Develop evaluation frameworks
Measure real-world generalization
Measure long-horizon reliability
Collaborate on training data requirements
Collaborate on augmentation strategies
Collaborate on model serving constraints
Stay current with research frontier
Critically evaluate recent work
Form views on relevance
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Data teams; Platform teams
Full Job Description
## Description Chef Robotics is accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food production — the sector facing the largest labor shortage in the U.S., with 1.14M unfilled jobs today and 3.1M projected by 2030. These roles can't be offshored, making robotics essential to keeping production onshore and strengthening America's manufacturing base. Our AI-powered robots automate food prep and assembly in commercial kitchens and food manufacturing, and have already produced over 110 million meals in production — generating the world's largest proprietary dataset for deformable food manipulation. Backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, Chef is rapidly scaling with multiple multi-year contracts and a mission to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen. About the Role The next leap in food robotics won't come from hand-tuned policies for individual ingredients — it will come from foundation models that generalize across thousands of food types, kitchen configurations, and manipulation scenarios out of the box. At Chef, we're building that model: the Food Foundation Model. As a Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models, you will work at the frontier of large-scale robot learning: training and fine-tuning the Food Foundation Model, building the data infrastructure that feeds it, and deploying it onto physical robots in production kitchens. You'll bridge research and engineering — translating advances from the latest policy learning, generative modeling, and world model literature into systems that handle real food, with real end effectors, at real throughput. Your models won't just benchmark well; they'll serve millions of meals. We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency. ## In this role, you will Define the architecture, training objective
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