Staff Autonomy Engineer
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Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
15 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
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 Chefs 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 Chefs 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 Chefs 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 whats ready to move from research into production
- Mentor senior engineers lead design reviews and help build a team capable of scaling Chefs 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
$160000 - $240000 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.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process such as reviewing applications analyzing resumes or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed please contact us.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
