Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation

Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation

San Francisco

Engineering - Autonomy /

Full Time /

On-site

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Chef Robotics is accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food production - the sector facing the largest labor shortage in the U.S., with 1.14M unfilled jobs today and 3.1M projected by 2030. These roles can''t be offshored, making robotics essential to keeping production onshore and strengthening America''s manufacturing base.

Our AI-powered robots automate food prep and assembly in commercial kitchens and food manufacturing, and have already produced over 110 million meals in production - generating the world''s largest proprietary dataset for deformable food manipulation. Backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, Chef is rapidly scaling with multiple multi-year contracts and a mission to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen.

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
• Work with the platform team to build data collection pipelines using teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and autonomous rollouts; work with the data team on dataset curation, augmentation, and training infrastructure
• Define evaluation metrics and regression benchmarks that accurately predict real-world manipulation performance; build recovery and fallback behaviors that handle dropped items, mis-grasps, and partial occlusions gracefully
• Partner with perception and robotics engineers to validate end-to-end grasp-to-place performance across new food classes, and end effector configurations

What You Bring:

• 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
• Track record of owning projects end-to-end: from problem framing through field deployment and iteration

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, diffusion policies, or transformer-based action representations
• Familiarity with simulation environments (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis) and sim-to-real transfer techniques
• Experience with multiple end effector types - suction, parallel jaw, multi-finger, or soft grippers
• Background in food, agriculture, or consumer goods robotics where object variability is high
• Experience with model compression, quantization, or TensorRT for edge deployment
• Contributions to open robotics datasets or publications at CoRL, ICRA, RSS, NeurIPS, or similar venues
• Experience using simulation environments (e.g. Isaac Sim, Gazebo) for synthetic data generation and domain randomization

$200,000 - $300,000 a year

Chef is an early-stage startup where equity is a major part of the compensation package. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

In addition to salary and early-stage equity, we offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, and vision insurance, commuter benefits, flexible paid time off (PTO), catered lunch, and 401(k) matching.

Chef Robotics is solving one of the hardest problems in AI and robotics - and we ship. Our robots are in production today, generating real data that trains the next generation of food AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, we''re scaling fast with multiple multi-year enterprise contracts. If you want to build physical AI with real-world deployments and real impact, Chef is the place.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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