ML 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. 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.

As a Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation, you will own the learning systems that enable our robots to reliably pick, place, and handle diverse food classes using multiple end effectors — from suction grippers to multi-finger hands. You will work end-to-end: from defining data collection strategies and training policies, to deploying and debugging those policies on physical robots in real environments. 

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 train manipulation policies — behavior cloning, imitation learning, and RL — for dexterous food handling across diverse item classes and end effector types (suction, parallel jaw, multi-finger)
• Implement and evaluate modern policy architectures (diffusion policies, transformer-based action models, action chunking) and adapt them to Chef's specific food manipulation challenges