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.
About the Role
The next leap in food robotics wont come from hand-tuned policies for individual ingredients it will come from foundation models that generalize across thousands of food types kitchen configurations and manipulation scenarios out of the box. At Chef were building that model: the Food Foundation Model.
As a Senior ML Engineer Foundation Models you will work at the frontier of large-scale robot learning: training and fine-tuning the Food Foundation Model building the data infrastructure that feeds it and deploying it onto physical robots in production kitchens. Youll bridge research and engineering translating advances from the latest policy learning generative modeling and world model literature into systems that handle real food with real end effectors at real throughput. Your models wont just benchmark well; theyll serve millions of meals.
We are a small high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.
In this role you will:
Define the architecture training objectives and learning approach for the Food Foundation Model evaluating tradeoffs across generalization sample efficiency and deployment constraints
Investigate and evaluate the latest foundation model architectures including VLAs world models JEPA-style joint embedding models diffusion policies and emerging approaches and assess their applicability to Chefs manipulation and generalization challenges
Design pre-training fine-tuning and alignment pipelines that improve the models ability to generalize across new food types kitchen configurations and end effector types with minimal retraining
Develop evaluation frameworks that measure real-world generalization and long-horizon reliability not just offline benchmark accuracy
Collaborate with the data and platform teams on training data requirements augmentation strategies and model serving constraints
Stay current with the research frontier reading and critically evaluating recent work from CoRL RSS NeurIPS ICML and ICLR and forming clear views on whats relevant to production manipulation
What You Bring:
MS or PhD in Machine Learning Robotics Computer Science or a related field or equivalent industry experience
5 years of experience implementing and deploying ML models for real-world robotics applications
Hands-on experience with large-scale model training: pre-training fine-tuning and post-training alignment pipelines
Familiarity with modern policy and generative model architectures diffusion models transformers behavior cloning or large-scale multimodal models
Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable production-quality training and evaluation infrastructure
Solid software engineering fundamentals in Python; able to write maintainable code across research and production codebases
Track record of taking models from research prototype to deployed system on physical hardware
Nice-to-have:
Experience with world models or generative models for robot planning and prediction
Background in large-scale distributed training (multi-node GPU clusters FSDP DeepSpeed)
Familiarity with simulation environments (MuJoCo Isaac Sim Genesis) for synthetic data generation and domain randomization
Prior work with contact-rich manipulation deformable object handling or food robotics
Publications at top venues: CoRL RSS ICRA NeurIPS ICML ICLR
$180000 - $280000 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 and vision insurance commuter benefits flexible paid time off (PTO) catered lunch and 401(k) matching.
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.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process such as reviewing applications analyzing resumes or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed please contact us.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
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 aut...
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.
About the Role
The next leap in food robotics wont come from hand-tuned policies for individual ingredients it will come from foundation models that generalize across thousands of food types kitchen configurations and manipulation scenarios out of the box. At Chef were building that model: the Food Foundation Model.
As a Senior ML Engineer Foundation Models you will work at the frontier of large-scale robot learning: training and fine-tuning the Food Foundation Model building the data infrastructure that feeds it and deploying it onto physical robots in production kitchens. Youll bridge research and engineering translating advances from the latest policy learning generative modeling and world model literature into systems that handle real food with real end effectors at real throughput. Your models wont just benchmark well; theyll serve millions of meals.
We are a small high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.
In this role you will:
Define the architecture training objectives and learning approach for the Food Foundation Model evaluating tradeoffs across generalization sample efficiency and deployment constraints
Investigate and evaluate the latest foundation model architectures including VLAs world models JEPA-style joint embedding models diffusion policies and emerging approaches and assess their applicability to Chefs manipulation and generalization challenges
Design pre-training fine-tuning and alignment pipelines that improve the models ability to generalize across new food types kitchen configurations and end effector types with minimal retraining
Develop evaluation frameworks that measure real-world generalization and long-horizon reliability not just offline benchmark accuracy
Collaborate with the data and platform teams on training data requirements augmentation strategies and model serving constraints
Stay current with the research frontier reading and critically evaluating recent work from CoRL RSS NeurIPS ICML and ICLR and forming clear views on whats relevant to production manipulation
What You Bring:
MS or PhD in Machine Learning Robotics Computer Science or a related field or equivalent industry experience
5 years of experience implementing and deploying ML models for real-world robotics applications
Hands-on experience with large-scale model training: pre-training fine-tuning and post-training alignment pipelines
Familiarity with modern policy and generative model architectures diffusion models transformers behavior cloning or large-scale multimodal models
Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable production-quality training and evaluation infrastructure
Solid software engineering fundamentals in Python; able to write maintainable code across research and production codebases
Track record of taking models from research prototype to deployed system on physical hardware
Nice-to-have:
Experience with world models or generative models for robot planning and prediction
Background in large-scale distributed training (multi-node GPU clusters FSDP DeepSpeed)
Familiarity with simulation environments (MuJoCo Isaac Sim Genesis) for synthetic data generation and domain randomization
Prior work with contact-rich manipulation deformable object handling or food robotics
Publications at top venues: CoRL RSS ICRA NeurIPS ICML ICLR
$180000 - $280000 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 and vision insurance commuter benefits flexible paid time off (PTO) catered lunch and 401(k) matching.
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.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process such as reviewing applications analyzing resumes or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed please contact us.
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