Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation

Job Description

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 Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments. Manipulation is one of the hardest open problems in robotics — and food makes it harder. Unlike structured industrial parts, food items are deformable, visually similar, irregularly shaped, and behave differently depending on temperature, moisture, and preparation state. At Chef, we're solving this in production, every day, across a growing menu of meal types and preparation configurations.

As a Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation, you will own the learning systems that enable our robots to reliably pick, place, and handle diverse food classes using multiple end effectors — from suction grippers to multi-finger hands. You will work end-to-end: from defining data collection strategies and training policies, to deploying and debugging those policies on physical robots in real environments. 

We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.

• Design and train manipulation policies — behavior cloning, imitation learning, and RL — for dexterous food handling across diverse item classes and end effector types (suction, parallel jaw, multi-finger)
• Implement and evaluate modern policy architectures (diffusion policies, transformer-based action models, action chunking) and adapt them to Chef's specific food manipulation challenges
• Work with the platform team to build data collection pipelines using teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and autonomous rollouts; work with the data team on dataset curation, augmentation, and training infrastructure
• Define evaluation metrics and regression benchmarks that accurately predict real-world manipulation performance; build recovery and fallback behaviors that handle dropped items, mis-grasps, and partial occlusions gracefully
• Partner with perception and robotics engineers to validate end-to-end grasp-to-place performance across new food classes, and end effector configurations

• MS or PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a closely related field — or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience developing and deploying ML systems for robotics manipulation, visuomotor control, or robot learning
• Deep expertise in at least two of: imitation learning, reinforcement learning, grasp estimation, or learned motion generation
• Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable, production-quality training and evaluation pipelines
• Hands-on experience deploying policies to real robotic hardware — not just simulation results
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python; ability to write maintainable, well-tested code across research and production codebases
• Track record of owning projects end-to-end: from problem framing through field deployment and iteration

• Experience with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, diffusion policies, or transformer-based action representations
• Familiarity with simulation environments (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis) and sim-to-real transfer techniques
• Experience with multiple end effector types — suction, parallel jaw, multi-finger, or soft grippers
• Background in food, agriculture, or consumer goods robotics where object variability is high
• Experience with model compression, quantization, or TensorRT for edge deployment
• Contributions to open robotics datasets or publications at CoRL, ICRA, RSS, NeurIPS, or similar venues
• Experience using simulation environments (e.g. Isaac Sim, Gazebo) for synthetic data generation and domain randomization

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: 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.

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.