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.
About the Role
Chef is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Robotics Platform, to help us scale our fleet of robots. You will make a large impact on a small team, ensuring our robot compute, OS, middleware, and networking provide a stable and performant platform for our autonomy software and algorithms. You'll be working on everything from low-level system software to high-bandwidth sensor data logging, debugging, and performance analysis. Ideal candidates will also be interested in overall product performance and will work closely with senior robotics and perception engineers to debug, test, and release new autonomy features.
\n
In this role, you will:
- Debug and fix difficult low-level systems software problems, e.g. with drivers, networking, Linux configuration.
- Lead an upgrade of our autonomy software OS and middleware.
- Investigate load and networking issues and increase performance of our perception and robotics algorithms.
- Work with manufacturing to develop processes for provisioning robotic systems at scale.
- Help integrate new robot hardware, sensors, and cameras, and monitor performance.
- Contribute to overall software architecture design and standards and test and release processes.
- Champion engineering excellence, ensuring high-quality, well-structured, and well-tested code.
What You Bring:
- BS in computer science, robotics, or equivalent experience.
- Strong experience and expertise in Linux systems, with at least 4+ years experience building complex software in a Linux environment.
- Excellent software engineering fundamentals.
- Experience leading and shipping complex software projects.
- Understanding of network and time protocols, e.g. TCP, UDP, PTP.
- Knowledge of build systems and tooling, performance optimization, and memory and network profiling.
Nice to Have:
- Robotics experience.
- Experience with the robotics tech stack, e.g. Linux, ROS, OpenCV, CUDA.
- Experience with full-stack web engineering and infrastructure.
- Experience in systems engineering or product management.
- Experience with basic mechatronics and electronics.
- Experience leading projects or people in a tech lead or similar capacity.
\n
$140,000 - $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.
In addition to salary and early-stage equity, we offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, and vision insurance, commuter benefits, flexible paid time off (PTO), catered lunch, and 401(k) matching.
\n
Chef Robotics is solving one of the hardest problems in AI: bringing intelligence into the physical world.
Our robots are already operating in production facilities every day, generating the real-world data that powers the next generation of embodied AI. If you want to build technology that leaves the lab, ships to customers, and transforms an industry, Chef is the place to do it.