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.

In this role, you will:

Architect and build our next-generation robotics platform — the foundation layer our robotics stack and forward-deployed models run on, spanning compute, OS, middleware, and networking — taking the lessons from the platform in production today into a clean-sheet design.
Build the infrastructure and frameworks that carry a robot across its whole software lifecycle — provisioning a new instance so it joins the fleet, then keeping its software updated from there on — working with manufacturing to do this at scale.
Lead an upgrade of our autonomy software OS and middleware.
Help integrate new robot hardware, sensors, and cameras, and monitor performance.
Investigate, debug and fix difficult low-level systems software problems and performance, e.g. with drivers, networking, Linux configuration.

What You Bring:

Strong experience and expertise in Linux systems — building complex software in a Linux environment.
Strong systems programming in C, C++, or Rust (Python a plus).
Excellent software engineering fundamentals.
Experience leading and shipping complex software projects.
Experience deploying and managing software across networked edge devices (robot fleets, embedded systems) and/or with ROS 2 middleware — the DDS-based publish/subscribe (topics) layer that connects a robot's software components.

Nice to Have:

Robotics experience.
Experience with the broader robotics tech stack, e.g. OpenCV, CUDA.
Understanding of network and time protocols, e.g. TCP, UDP, PTP.
Experience in systems engineering.
Experience with basic mechatronics and electronics.
Experience leading projects or people in a tech-lead or similar capacity.
A Master's or PhD — not required, but we value the depth of reasoning that sustained research develops.

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.

160000 - 240000 USD a year