# Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation 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/ad92bc91-ae6b-4ef1-a794-97913052b20a
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/chef-robotics-senior-ml-engineer-manipulation/

## 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

Tags: Autonomy