Senior Software Engineer, Robotics Platform

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 looking for a Software Engineer, Robotics Platform to help us scale our fleet of robots. This role is on-site five days a week in San Francisco — it's how our small, high-ownership team moves.

The robot platform is the foundation layer our entire robotics stack — and the ML models we run on the robot (our "forward-deployed" models) — runs on: robot compute, OS, middleware, and networking. You'll own it, making it a stable, performant base for our perception and robotics algorithms. The work spans everything from low-level system software to high-bandwidth sensor logging, debugging, and performance analysis, in close partnership with senior robotics and perception engineers.

Our next-generation platform is greenfield: we're taking everything we've learned from the platform running in production today and designing the next one from a clean sheet — run as an applied hypothesis - experiment - learn loop. You'll be central to that.

We want architects who work full-stack — from system design down to the metal — not armchair architects. Engineers who design a system and live with its low-level consequences, who feel the pain a design inflicts downstream and account for it from the start.

And while we hire you for a specific set of strengths, we won't pigeonhole you into a narrow lane. You're free — encouraged — to contribute anywhere in the company you can make it better.

In this role, you will:

• Architect and build our next-generation robotics platform — the foundation layer our robotics stack and forward-deployed models run on, spanning compute, OS, middleware, and networking — taking the lessons from the platform in production today into a clean-sheet design.
• Build the infrastructure and frameworks that carry a robot across its whole software lifecycle — provisioning a new instance so it joins the fleet, then keeping its software updated from there on — working with manufacturing to do this at scale.
• Lead an upgrade of our autonomy software OS and middleware.
• Help integrate new robot hardware, sensors, and cameras, and monitor performance.
• Investigate, debug and fix difficult low-level systems software problems and performance, e.g. with drivers, networking, Linux configuration.

What You Bring:

• Strong experience and expertise in Linux systems — building complex software in a Linux environment.
• Strong systems programming in C, C++, or Rust (Python a plus).
• Excellent software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience leading and shipping complex software projects.
• Experience deploying and managing software across networked edge devices (robot fleets, embedded systems) and/or with ROS 2 middleware — the DDS-based publish/subscribe (topics) layer that connects a robot's software components.

Nice to Have:

• Robotics experience.
• Experience with the broader robotics tech stack, e.g. OpenCV, CUDA.
• Understanding of network and time protocols, e.g. TCP, UDP, PTP.
• Experience in systems engineering.
• Experience with basic mechatronics and electronics.
• Experience leading projects or people in a tech-lead or similar capacity.
• A Master's or PhD — not required, but we value the depth of reasoning that sustained research develops.

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.

160000 - 240000 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
• vision insurance
• commuter benefits
• flexible paid time off (PTO)
• catered lunch
• 401(k) matching