Chef Robotics

Head of Hardware

Posted 18 Days Ago

Be an Early Applicant

San Francisco, CA

In-Office

Expert/Leader

Artificial Intelligence • Food • Robotics

The Role

Lead hardware engineering and potentially supply chain for robot systems in commercial kitchens, focusing on design, scalability, and reliability. Manage and expand the team while representing the hardware section in company leadership decisions.

Summary Generated by Built In

About Our Team

Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world. As the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT has shown, AI has the potential to drive immense change. However, we believe AI’s biggest impact will be in the physical world, given industries like manufacturing, food, and transportation represent 90% of global GDP. We're starting with food, with a goal to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen in the world. We have signed multiple multi-year contracts with various large food companies and we are growing fast. We're backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg BETA and Promus Ventures. We have a great team, where you will be surrounded by talented engineers and tech leaders from companies like Cruise, Zoox, Google, Verb Surgical, Tesla, Nuro, Vicarious, Amazon Robotics, Strateos, Built Robotics, Facebook, Plenty, Yelp, and Microsoft.

In this role, you'll be a partner to lead the hardware engineering team (and, depending on the candidate, perhaps also the manufacturing/supply chain team). Our next goal is to build and scale to 1,000 robot systems worldwide.

What you'll do

Oversee Chef's hardware engineering org
Help execute as a player coach
Help expand the set of ingredients that Chef can manipulate (e.g., sticky cheese, fruit, piece picking, etc.)
Help design and build Chef's next-gen system
Help improve reliability / MTBF for Chef's current systems in the field
Help reduce BOM
Help set technical direction for HW team
(Depending on the candidate) Oversee Chef's manufacturing and supply chain team and help scale to 250, 500, and then 1000 robots in production.
Help be on Chef's leadership team. Represent HW team and also help Chef make the right company-level decisions.
Help hire and build a team as needed
Help fundraise

Requirements

Masters or Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or physics
Has shipped 3+ (at least 2) products to market
Has seen at least one product scale to tens of thousands of users/customers
Has lead manufacturing (or managed someone who lead manufacturing)
Has lead supply chain and procurement (or managed someone who lead supply chain and procurement)
Has 10+ years of production engineering experience as an IC, tech lead, or manager
Has managed and lead teams in: Manufacturing, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Firmware
Has worked with Perception / computer vision, Machine learning, Robotics motion planning and control
Has been a manager of a team of engineers and a manager of managers (two layers)
Has been part of at least one startup
Has scaled an engineering team from 5 people to 15 to 45 people
Understand the business logic and the business
Can sell and convince top A-level hires to join the company
Can represent the company and sell the company to investors for prospective investors
Can be onsite in our SF office

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizen status, uniform service member and veteran status, marital status, age, pregnancy status, protected medical condition, genetic information, disability, or any other protected status.

Multiple studies have found that a higher percentage of women and BIPOC candidates won't apply if they don't meet every listed qualification. Chef values candidates of all backgrounds. If you find yourself excited by our mission but you don't check every box in the description, we encourage you to apply anyway!