Robotics Software Test Engineer
Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Yearly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Chef Robotics is bringing AI into the physical world starting with one of the worlds 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 Amys Kitchen gategroup and CookUnity. Our robots have made over 100 million servings in production creating the worlds 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 were 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 youre excited about solving hard problems creating real customer impact and shipping systems that operate in production every day not just in the lab youll feel at home at Chef.
Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments and a software regression in production isnt just a bug its a missed meal a stopped line or a customer incident. As a Robotics Software Test Engineer you own the quality bar for our entire robot software stack: perception autonomy platform and the integrations between them.
This is a builder role not a manual QA role. Youll design and implement the test infrastructure CI/CD gates and hardware-in-the-loop validation systems that let a small team ship fast without breaking things in the field. Youll work directly with perception and robotics engineers embedded in the team not downstream of it and your test frameworks will be first-class engineering artifacts.
We are a small high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.
- Design and implement automated test plans test cases and fixtures across the full robot software stack from unit tests to system-level integration tests
- Build and own hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test infrastructure that validates perception robotics and platform software against real or simulated hardware
- Strengthen and extend CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early and gate releases with high confidence
- Define quality metrics and release readiness criteria; track test coverage failure trends and fleet health to give the team clear signal
- Investigate and root-cause production failures across software hardware and system boundaries; build regression tests to prevent recurrence
- Develop simulation-based test environments to validate perception and robotics changes before deploying to physical robots
- Participate in design and code reviews with a lens on testability observability and failure modes
- Instrument the robot software stack for better debuggability and post-hoc failure analysis
- 3 years of experience in software test engineering reliability engineering or a closely related role
- Strong Python skills
- Hands-on experience designing and building test infrastructure not just writing tests but building the systems that run them
- Experience with CI/CD systems and integrating automated testing into release pipelines
- Strong debugging instincts able to trace failures across software layers hardware interfaces and timing boundaries
- Solid understanding of testing methodologies across unit integration system and hardware-in-the-loop layers
- Comfort working in Linux-based development and production environments
- Self-starter who can prioritize independently in an ambiguous fast-moving environment
- Experience testing robotics software stacks (ROS perception pipelines control systems)
- Familiarity with simulation environments (Gazebo Isaac Sim) for test scenario generation
- Experience with Docker or containerized test environments
- Background in data logging observability pipelines or fleet monitoring systems
- Knowledge of networking protocols relevant to robotics (TCP/UDP PTP gRPC)
- Experience with hardware bring-up sensor calibration or embedded systems testing
- Prior work in fast-paced robotics or hardware startups
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.
Required Experience:
IC
