Staff Autonomy Engineer

Job Description

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.

• 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

• 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

• 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 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.

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. 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.