Robotics Software Test Engineer

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 intelligent machines that solve meaningful problems in the real world.

If you’re excited about solving hard problems, creating real customer impact, and shipping systems that operate in production every day, not just in the lab, you’ll feel at home at Chef.

About the Role
Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments — and a software regression in production isn't just a bug, it's 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. You'll 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. You'll 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.

In this role, you will:

• 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