Staff Autonomy Engineer

Chefrobotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Chefrobotics is seeking a Staff Autonomy Engineer in San Francisco, California. You will lead the technical architecture for our autonomy systems, developing innovative solutions in food robotics. This role demands strong technical acumen and leadership skills within a startup environment.

The ideal candidate has a robust background in robotics and software engineering, capable of mentoring others. Join us to tackle complex AI challenges and make a real-world impact in the food industry.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping complete autonomy systems to real-world deployment.
• Deep expertise in perception systems or visuomotor control.
• Software engineering fundamentals in Python and C++.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture of Chef's autonomy stack.
• Design and implement learning-based systems for robot actions.
• Build closed-loop control systems with vision, feedback, and planning.

Skills

Perception systems

Visuomotor control

Action prediction

Sensor fusion

Motion planning

Python

C++

Tools

ML frameworks (PyTorch)

ROS

Job description

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.

About the Role

As a Staff Autonomy Engineer, you will own the technical architecture of Chef's 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 Chef's 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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Qualifications

• 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

Additional Experience

• 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

Chef Robotics is solving one of the hardest problems in AI and robotics — and we ship. Our robots are in production today, generating real data that trains the next generation of food AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, we're scaling fast with multiple multi-year enterprise contracts. If you want to build physical AI with real‑world deployments and real impact, Chef is the place.