Staff Autonomy Engineer

Team: Autonomy

Location: San Francisco

Commitment: Full Time

Workplace Type: onsite

Salary:

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.

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