# Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models at Chef Robotics

- Company: Chef Robotics
- What the company does: Chef Robotics brings intelligent, adaptable automation to food manufacturers. Scale meal assembly with robots built for the real world. Backed by Kleiner Perkins.
- Company website: https://chefrobotics.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $180K to $280K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-15
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/ChefRobotics/a4c25a10-b811-4002-b0c9-4319bdee14a3
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/chef-robotics-senior-ml-engineer-foundation-models/

## About the role

The next leap in food robotics won't 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, we're building that model: the Food Foundation Model.

## What they're looking for

- 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

Tags: Autonomy