Senior Perception 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, train, and optimize deep learning models for detection, segmentation, segmentation, pose estimation, and classification — with a focus on real-world robustness over benchmark performance.
• Build low-latency inference pipelines that approach real-time performance; profile and optimize models for deployment on embedded and edge hardware.
• Develop and improve multi-object tracking algorithms for reliable identification and motion prediction of items across frames.
• Solve challenging perception problems specific to food robotics: deformable objects, occlusions, varying lighting, and high visual similarity between categories.
• Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle: data collection strategy, annotation tooling, dataset curation, augmentation pipelines, model training, evaluation, deployment, and field debugging.
• Develop tooling to monitor model performance in production and drive continuous improvement cycles.
• Partner closely with robotics, hardware, and software engineers to translate perception capabilities into reliable end-to-end robot behaviors.
• Help define the perception roadmap and influence technical direction as the team grows.
• Assist in integrating new cameras and sensors for enhanced robotic vision.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field.
• 5+ years of combined research and industry experience in computer vision and machine learning, with a track record of shipping perception systems to production.
• Deep expertise in at least two of: instance/semantic segmentation, object detection, 3D perception, or multi-object tracking.