Robotic Operations Engineer

Chef Robotics

Chef Robotics

Operations

San Francisco, CA, USA

USD 90k-120k / year + Equity

Posted on May 5, 2026
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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 is seeking a Robotic Operations Engineer to be the first point of contact for incoming issues at a customer site. You'll work from our SF office, monitoring and responding to support requests that come in through Slack, Microsoft Teams, our web portal, email, and phone; triaging, troubleshooting remotely, documenting, and escalating issues across our deployed fleet.In this role, you’ll work in the office communicating with customers’ operations teams to understand issues on site, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix based on playbooks and deploy fixes or mitigations. When help is needed you will lead escalations to Systems Support Engineers and Applications Engineers. Further, you will work with the Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance and to develop and test new tasks for the robot leading to expansion at existing customers

This is an opportunity to use your deep technical expertise and passion for robotics while having a direct impact on Continuous Improvement and Chef's revenue stream. In this role, you’ll be responsible for managing one of the core drivers of the company’s success, our relationships with our customers. If you’re excited about working in a customer-facing role on hard technical problems and you thrive in the fast-paced, dynamic environment of an early-stage startup, we’d love to hear from you. Please note that this is a customer facing role and works during off-hours.
Shift is from Fri-Mon from 6 am - 4 pm PST

In this role, you will:

  • Investigate customer issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix and deploy fixes or mitigations
  • Perform remote diagnostics: guide on-site operators or field technicians through troubleshooting steps via company portal and internal tools.
  • Track and log hardware requests, part numbers, and part quantities using the hardware request workflow
  • Are familiar with APIs and technical RaaS products and can deeply understand technical docs with ease
  • Have demonstrated an ability to thrive in fast-paced, reactive situations while meeting core support metrics targets (e.g. CSAT, SLA, etc.)
  • Possess strong user empathy and are expert in the lifecycle of a support case; you can read between the lines of a user’s question, put yourself in their shoes, and get at the heart of their needs for a speedy, satisfying resolution
  • Write and maintain internal external documentation: runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and FAQ articles based on real ticket patterns
  • Collaborate with Chef’s Systems Support and Application teams to prioritize to resolve production blocking issues
  • Work with 3P Technicians to coordinate break/fix at a Customer Site
  • Keep customer portal tidy: maintain accurate ticket states, flag duplicates, and close resolved issues
  • Work with Chef’s Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance

What You Bring:

  • BS in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
  • Minimum 1 years experience in a customer-facing role in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, or similar roles
  • Prior experience in API integrations for Support tooling development
  • Comfort with command line interfaces and basic scripting (Bash, Python, JavaScript)
  • Demonstrated track record of shipping products quickly and efficiently
  • Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
  • Ability to travel at least 20% of your time is required
  • Must be available to work a flexible schedule to support customers, including on-call hours
  • Familiar with Linux/Unix and/or Robot Operating System (ROS); Python or Linux experience is a plus
  • Strong communications and project management skills to recognize, communicate, and properly document product issues, complaints and improvements

Preferred:

  • Bilingual English/Spanish - A large number of our customer on-site teams operate in Spanish

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.

90000 - 120000 USD 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.
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