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 is looking for a Software Engineer, Robotics Platform to help us scale our fleet of robots. This role is on-site five days a week in San Francisco — it's how our small, high-ownership team moves.
The robot platform is the foundation layer our entire robotics stack — and the ML models we run on the robot (our "forward-deployed" models) — runs on: robot compute, OS, middleware, and networking. You'll own it, making it a stable, performant base for our perception and robotics algorithms. The work spans everything from low-level system software to high-bandwidth sensor logging, debugging, and performance analysis, in close partnership with senior robotics and perception engineers.
Our next-generation platform is greenfield: we're taking everything we've learned from the platform running in production today and designing the next one from a clean sheet — run as an applied hypothesis → experiment → learn loop. You'll be central to that.
We want architects who work full-stack — from system design down to the metal — not armchair architects. Engineers who design a system and live with its low-level consequences, who feel the pain a design inflicts downstream and account for it from the start.
And while we hire you for a specific set of strengths, we won't pigeonhole you into a narrow lane. You're free — encouraged — to contribute anywhere in the company you can make it better.
Chef Robotics is solving one of the hardest problems in AI: bringing intelligence into the physical world.
Our robots are already operating in production facilities every day, generating the real-world data that powers the next generation of embodied AI. If you want to build technology that leaves the lab, ships to customers, and transforms an industry, Chef is the place to do it.
At Chef we believe that AI’s biggest impact will be on the physical world, representing 90% of Global GDP. In the food industry, for example, in 2023 there were 1,137,000 jobs unfilled in food preparation and service (Bureau for Labor Statistics). These growing labor shortages are forcing food companies to leave millions of dollars on the table every year in unmet demand. As this pain becomes more acute, food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives, including off-shoring more and more parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available; this of course comes with its own significant risks for the US.
Chef Robotics offers a new way for food companies to overcome their labor shortage and increase production volume using AI-enabled robots that mimic the flexibility of humans. Chef allows companies to maximize revenue by meeting demand, while keeping the American food supply chain onshore.
Chef's mission is to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the world to empower humans to do what humans do best.
