Chef Robotics
Robotics
StaffAutonomyEngineer
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Lead candidates.
“Staff Autonomy Engineer at Chef Robotics. Skills: Autonomy stack architecture, Perception, Action prediction, Closed-loop control, Sensor fusion, Production deployment, Learning-based systems, Robot learning, Foundation models, Manipulation research. 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 tha”
What You'll Achieve.
Accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in the physical world; Scaling Chef's autonomy stack to hundreds of deployed systems; Shipping a complete autonomy or manipulation system to real-world deployment; Autonomy drive reliability and performance improvements
Industry & Context.
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
Demonstrated experience shipping a complete autonomy or manipulation system to real-world deployment, Deep technical expertise across at least two of: perception systems, visuomotor control, action prediction, sensor fusion, or motion planning, 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
What You'll Do.
Own the end-to-end architecture and hands-on development of Chef's autonomy stack — perception
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
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
and continuous build data collection pipelines that feed back into model retraining
Define objective qualification criteria for autonomy drive reliability and performance improvements using production data across the deployed fleet
Investigate and integrate the latest advances in robot learning
and manipulation research — continuously evaluating what's ready to move from research into production
Mentor senior engineers
and help build a team capable of scaling Chef's autonomy stack to hundreds of deployed systems
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Driving cross-functional alignment; Leading cross-functional projects
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 As a Staff Autonomy Engineer, you will own the technical architecture of Chef's autonomy stack end-to-end — from perception and action prediction through closed-loop control and production deployment. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: expect to spend the majority of your time designing and building, with the remainder setting direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-functional alignment. You will report directly to the engineering leadership and have direct influence over how Chef's autonomy systems scale across a growing commercial fleet. We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency. ## 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 acro
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