Chef Robotics brings intelligent, adaptable automation to food manufacturers. Scale meal assembly with robots built for the real world. Backed by Kleiner Perkins.
About the role
Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments. Manipulation is one of the hardest open problems in robotics — and food makes it harder. Unlike structured industrial parts, food items are deformable, visually similar, irregularly shaped, and behave differently depending on temperature, moisture, and preparation state. At Chef, we're solving this in production, every day, across a growing menu of meal types and preparation configurations.
What they're looking for
- MS or PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a closely related field — or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of experience developing and deploying ML systems for robotics manipulation, visuomotor control, or robot learning
- Deep expertise in at least two of: imitation learning, reinforcement learning, grasp estimation, or learned motion generation
- Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable, production-quality training and evaluation pipelines
- Hands-on experience deploying policies to real robotic hardware — not just simulation results
- Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python, ability to write maintainable, well-tested code across research and production codebases
More about this role
Chef Robotics is bringing AI into the physical world, starting with one of the world’s 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 Amy’s Kitchen, gategroup, and CookUnity. Our robots have made over 100 million servings in production, creating the world’s 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, we’re 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...
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