Robotics Software Test Engineer

Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food.

We build AI-powered robots that assemble fresh meals at scale for some of the largest food producers in North America — companies making ready-to-eat meals for airlines, retailers, meal kits, and the frozen food aisle.

Our robots operate in high-mix, high-variability production environments where ingredients change shape, color, and consistency from one tray to the next.

Solving this requires tightly coupled perception, manipulation, and learning — and a team that ships hardware-software systems into customer facilities and keeps them running.

Headquartered in San Francisco, we are a venture-backed team of robotics, ML, and operations engineers building the foundation for general-purpose food robotics.

• Design and implement automated test plans, test cases, and fixtures across the full robot software stack — from unit tests to system-level integration tests
• Build and own hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test infrastructure that validates perception, robotics, and platform software against real or simulated hardware
• Strengthen and extend CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early and gate releases with high confidence
• Define quality metrics and release readiness criteria; track test coverage, failure trends, and fleet health to give the team clear signal
• Investigate and root-cause production failures across software, hardware, and system boundaries; build regression tests to prevent recurrence
• Develop simulation-based test environments to validate perception and robotics changes before deploying to physical robots
• Participate in design and code reviews with a lens on testability, observability, and failure modes
• Instrument the robot software stack for better debuggability and post-hoc failure analysis
• 3+ years of experience in software test engineering, reliability engineering, or a closely related role
• Strong Python skills
• Hands-on experience designing and building test infrastructure — not just writing tests, but building the systems that run them
• Experience with CI/CD systems and integrating automated testing into release pipelines
• Strong debugging instincts — able to trace failures across software layers, hardware interfaces, and timing boundaries
• Solid understanding of testing methodologies across unit, integration, system, and hardware-in-the-loop layers