Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models

Chef Robotics is bringing AI into the physical world, starting with one of the world’s largest industries: food manufacturing. Food production faces one of the most severe labor shortages in the US, with more than 1 million open jobs today and demand continuing to grow. Our robots help manufacturers automate repetitive food-preparation and assembly tasks so they can increase throughput, improve consistency, and keep production onshore. Today, Chef robots operate in production facilities across North America and Europe, serving customers including Amy’s Kitchen, gategroup, and CookUnity. Our robots have made over 100 million servings in production, creating the world’s largest proprietary dataset for AI-powered manipulation of deformable food. Every meal our robots produce makes the system smarter. Backed by leading investors including Avataar Ventures, Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins, we’re scaling rapidly with a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model and long-term customer partnerships. Our team includes engineers and leaders from Google, Cruise, Tesla, Amazon Robotics, Dexterity, Bear Robotics, Saildrone, and Zoox, united by a mission to build intelligent machines that solve meaningful problems in the real world. If you’re excited about solving hard problems, creating real customer impact, and shipping systems that operate in production every day, not just in the lab, you’ll feel at home at Chef. About the Role The next leap in food robotics won't come from hand-tuned policies for individual ingredients — it will come from foundation models that generalize across thousands of food types, kitchen configurations, and manipulation scenarios out of the box. At Chef, we're building that model: the Food Foundation Model. As a Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models, you will work at the frontier of large-scale robot learning: training and fine-tuning the Food Foundation Model, building the data infrastructure that feeds it, and deploying it onto physical robots in production kitchens. You'll bridge research and engineering — translating advances from the latest policy learning, generative modeling, and world model literature into systems that handle real food, with real end effectors, at real throughput. Your models won't just benchmark well; they'll serve millions of meals. We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.