Staff Autonomy Engineer

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.

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 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

$160,000 - $240,000 a year

Chef is an early-stage startup where equity is a major part of the compensation package. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.