Lead Performance Engineer

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.

As Lead Performance Engineer, you will be responsible for leading the ongoing testing and performance of our food robotics fleet to enable us to scale. You will collaborate with the Engineering, Product, and Applications teams to evaluate and improve the performance, reliability, and usability of our robots, and build the necessary processes, tooling, and analytics capabilities to do so. This is an exciting opportunity to enable the expansion of the world's most productive fleet in food robotics, having already served tens of millions of meals.

What you'll do

• Lead ongoing software and hardware testing and develop streamlined processes to both capture issues and efficiently test the complete robotic system.
• Evaluate results of testing and highlight areas for improvement.
• Either make recommended changes yourself in mechanical/electrical/software systems or work with engineers to make changes.
• Develop automated and semi-automated test capabilities using software and hardware for the robots and new feature releases and assist with the testing of those features.
• Create software tooling to make testing easier.
• Write data pipelining tools and software to collect data locally and in the cloud.
• Help develop a robust management system for test resource allocation (test space, robots, servers, test equipment).
• Work closely with the product development team for any ongoing prototyping or validation needs.
• Grow the performance team within our organization, and lead and mentor other performance engineers and technicians.

Requirements for the role

• 5+ years as a Test or Performance Engineer working with robotics/autonomous systems.
• B.S in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Math, or other relevant discipline.
• Experience managing the test and release process for a production robotic fleet.
• Robust foundational knowledge in statistics.
• Strong analytical reasoning, organizational, communication, and prioritization skills.
• Familiar with software development concepts and programming languages (C++ and Python).
• Prior work building test fixtures and/or automated testing routines.

Bonus points

• Prior experience in management at a growth-stage startup.
• Experience with robotic manipulation systems.
• Experience with continuous learning systems.

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!