Robotic Operations Engineer

TAU Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Commuter benefits

Flexible PTO

Catered lunch

401(k) matching

Job summary

Chef Robotics is seeking a Robotic Operations Engineer to be the first contact for customer-site issues, based in our SF office. You will triage, troubleshoot, document, and escalate problems across the deployed fleet, guiding on-site operators and coordinating with Systems Support and Applications teams.

You will work with the Customer Support Manager to improve performance, write runbooks, and contribute to the expansion of our RaaS deployments while supporting a flexible schedule and on-call

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, Robotics, EE, or ME.
• 1 year in a customer-facing role in applications engineering or similar.
• Experience with API integrations for support tooling.
• Comfort with CLI and scripting (Bash, Python, JS).
• Track record of shipping products quickly.
• Willingness to travel at least 20%.
• Available to work flexible hours including on-call.
• Familiar with Linux/ROS; Python or Linux experience a plus.
• Strong communications and project management skills.

Responsibilities

• Investigate and triage customer issues and deploy fixes or mitigations.
• Perform remote diagnostics and guide operators through troubleshooting steps.
• Log hardware requests and track part numbers.
• Understand APIs and technical docs for RaaS products.
• Maintain customer ticket lifecycle and meet support metrics.
• Collaborate with Systems Support and Applications teams to resolve blocking issues.
• Coordinate with 3P technicians for on-site breaks/fixes.
• Improve performance and documentation based on ticket patterns.

Skills

APIs

Scripting

Linux/ROS

Communication

Project management

Customer-facing

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Bachelor's degree in Robotics

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Job description

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 seeking a Robotic Operations Engineer to be the first point of contact for incoming issues at a customer site. You'll work from our SF office, monitoring and responding to support requests that come in through Slack, Microsoft Teams, our web portal, email, and phone; triaging, troubleshooting remotely, documenting, and escalating issues across our deployed fleet.In this role, you’ll work in the office communicating with customers’ operations teams to understand issues on site, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix based on playbooks and deploy fixes or mitigations. When help is needed you will lead escalations to Systems Support Engineers and Applications Engineers. Further, you will work with the Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance and to develop and test new tasks for the robot leading to expansion at existing customers

This is an opportunity to use your deep technical expertise and passion for robotics while having a direct impact on Continuous Improvement and Chef's revenue stream. In this role, you’ll be responsible for managing one of the core drivers of the company’s success, our relationships with our customers. If you’re excited about working in a customer-facing role on hard technical problems and you thrive in the fast-paced, dynamic environment of an early-stage startup, we’d love to hear from you. Please note that this is a customer facing role and works during off-hours.

Shift is from Fri-Mon from 6 am - 4 pm PST

In this role, you will:

• Investigate customer issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix and deploy fixes or mitigations
• Perform remote diagnostics: guide on-site operators or field technicians through troubleshooting steps via company portal and internal tools.
• Track and log hardware requests, part numbers, and part quantities using the hardware request workflow
• Are familiar with APIs and technical RaaS products and can deeply understand technical docs with ease
• Have demonstrated an ability to thrive in fast-paced, reactive situations while meeting core support metrics targets (e.g. CSAT, SLA, etc.)
• Possess strong user empathy and are expert in the lifecycle of a support case; you can read between the lines of a user’s question, put yourself in their shoes, and get at the heart of their needs for a speedy, satisfying resolution
• Write and maintain internal external documentation: runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and FAQ articles based on real ticket patterns
• Collaborate with Chef’s Systems Support and Application teams to prioritize to resolve production blocking issues
• Work with 3P Technicians to coordinate break/fix at a Customer Site
• Keep customer portal tidy: maintain accurate ticket states, flag duplicates, and close resolved issues
• Work with Chef’s Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance

What You Bring:

• BS in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• Minimum 1 years experience in a customer-facing role in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, or similar roles
• Prior experience in API integrations for Support tooling development
• Comfort with command line interfaces and basic scripting (Bash, Python, JavaScript)
• Demonstrated track record of shipping products quickly and efficiently
• Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
• Ability to travel at least 20% of your time is required
• Must be available to work a flexible schedule to support customers, including on-call hours
• Familiar with Linux/Unix and/or Robot Operating System (ROS); Python or Linux experience is a plus
• Strong communications and project management skills to recognize, communicate, and properly document product issues, complaints and improvements

Preferred:

• Bilingual English/Spanish - A large number of our customer on-site teams operate in Spanish

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.

90000 - 120000 USD 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.