Senior Perception Engineer
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Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
19 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
Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments and perception is at the heart of what makes them reliable. As a Perception Engineer you will own the full stack of how our robots see and understand the world: from integrating cutting-edge camera hardware to training production-grade deep learning models to ensuring those models perform accurately and efficiently in real-time on the factory floor.
You will work on some of the most technically rich problems in applied robotics dense instance segmentation of deformable food items real-time inference under tight latency constraints sensor fusion and robust tracking in cluttered dynamic environments. You will not just train models; you will design the pipelines that gather and curate data define the architectures that balance accuracy and speed and own the deployment and field troubleshooting of what you build.
We are a small high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency you will be expected to go deep technically while staying pragmatic about what ships.
In this role you will:
- Design train and optimize deep learning models for detection segmentation segmentation pose estimation and classification with a focus on real-world robustness over benchmark performance.
- Build low-latency inference pipelines that approach real-time performance; profile and optimize models for deployment on embedded and edge hardware.
- Develop and improve multi-object tracking algorithms for reliable identification and motion prediction of items across frames.
- Solve challenging perception problems specific to food robotics: deformable objects occlusions varying lighting and high visual similarity between categories.
- Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle: data collection strategy annotation tooling dataset curation augmentation pipelines model training evaluation deployment and field debugging.
- Develop tooling to monitor model performance in production and drive continuous improvement cycles.
- Partner closely with robotics hardware and software engineers to translate perception capabilities into reliable end-to-end robot behaviors.
- Help define the perception roadmap and influence technical direction as the team grows.
- Assist in integrating new cameras and sensors for enhanced robotic vision.
What You Bring:
- BS MS or PhD in Computer Science Robotics Electrical Engineering or a closely related field.
- 5 years of combined research and industry experience in computer vision and machine learning with a track record of shipping perception systems to production.
- Deep expertise in at least two of: instance/semantic segmentation object detection 3D perception or multi-object tracking.
- Strong Python skills; experience building production-quality maintainable code not just research prototypes.
- Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch strongly preferred) and the full training pipeline from data to deployed model.
- Experience working with RGBD sensors depth cameras and point cloud data.
- Proven ability to build and optimize models for low-latency real-time inference.
- Familiarity with ROS or similar robotics middleware.
Nice-to-have:
- Experience using simulation environments (e.g. Isaac Sim Gazebo) for synthetic data generation domain randomization and sim-to-real transfer of perception models.
- C proficiency for performance-critical modules and embedded deployment.
- Experience with cloud ML infrastructure (GCP AWS) and containerization (Docker Kubernetes).
- Background in autonomous vehicles warehouse robotics or other perception-heavy robotics applications.
- Contributions to open-source CV/ML projects or publications in top-tier venues (CVPR ECCV NeurIPS etc.).
$170000 - $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:
Senior IC
