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.
Responsibilities:
- Partner with Sales and Product teams during early customer engagements to assess customer needs, identify opportunities, and evaluate technical feasibility.
- Work directly with customers’ engineering and operations teams to understand their processes, challenges and success metrics.
- Configure, test, and validate Chef’s robotic systems in the lab, working closely with R&D to adapt to each customer’s unique production environment.
- Lead and project manage deployments, coordinating across Chef’s engineering, manufacturing, and customer teams to ensure smooth installations.
- Lead on-site deployments, including installation, qualification testing, and production hardening
- Work hands-on with the systems to test new software, configurations and resolve break fix hardware repairs.
- Provide post-deployment support to ensure customer satisfaction and identify opportunities for product and feature expansion.
- Capture customer feedback and translate it into actionable insights for Chef’s product and engineering teams.
- Serve as the technical face of Chef Robotics representing our engineering rigor, problem-solving mindset and commitment to customer success.
Qualifications:
- You are energized by seeing technology make a tangible impact in the real world and enjoy the challenge of bringing complex systems to life in customer environments.
- You thrive in dynamic, fast-paced settings and can manage multiple deployments, customers and competing priorities with professionalism and clarity.
- You’re an excellent communicator who can translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- You’re self-driven and resourceful, with a bias for action and the ability to work autonomously in the field.
Requirements:
- BS or MS in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or a related field
- 2+ years of experience in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, field robotics or a similar customer-facing technical role
- Prior experience in at least one of the following: robotics, motion planning, perception, controls or automation systems.
- Willingness to travel up to 75% across North America to support customer deployments and on-site work
- Familiarity with Linux/Unix, Robot Operating System (ROS), and scripting in Python.
- Strong organizational and interpersonal skills - comfortable collaborating across technical and operations teams both internally and with customers
- Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
- Must be available to work a flexible schedule to support customers, including some weekend, nights and on-call hours
Why You’ll Love Working Here
- Be part of a mission-driven team transforming one of the world’s largest industries.
- Work hands-on with cutting edge robotic systems solving real world problems.
- Collaborate with a world class, cross functional team of roboticists, engineers and operators.
- Build rare, multidisciplinary expertise at the intersection of robotics, operations and customer success.
- Benefit from professional growth with exposure to both leadership and technical career paths.
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.
Skills Required
- BS or MS in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or a related field
- 2+ years of experience in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, field robotics or a similar customer-facing technical role
- Prior experience in robotics, motion planning, perception, controls or automation systems
- Willingness to travel up to 75% across North America
- Strong organizational and interpersonal skills
- Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
What We Do
Coming soon!
