Applied ML Research Engineer - Robotics
San Francisco
Engineering – Software /
Full Time /
On-site
About Our Team
Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world. As the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT has shown, AI has the potential to drive immense change. However, we believe AI’s biggest impact will be in the physical world, given industries like manufacturing, food, and transportation represent 90% of global GDP. We're starting with food, with a goal to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen in the world. We have signed multiple multi-year contracts with various large food companies and we are growing fast. We're backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg BETA and Promus Ventures. We have a great team, where you will be surrounded by talented engineers and tech leaders from companies like Cruise, Zoox, Google, Verb Surgical, Tesla, Nuro, Vicarious, Amazon Robotics, Strateos, Built Robotics, Facebook, Plenty, Yelp, and Microsoft.
About the Role
As an Applied Research Engineer, you'll design and implement cutting-edge reinforcement learning and imitation learning systems for robotic food manipulation. You'll build RL/IL algorithms that solve real production challenges - from adaptive manipulation across thousands of ingredient types to multi-arm coordination - and deploy them in commercial environments serving millions of meals.
What You'll Do:
- Build and deploy RL/IL systems for robotic food manipulation, developing policies that adapt to diverse ingredients with minimal human intervention
- Engineer multi-agent RL solutions for dual-arm coordination and collaborative manipulation workflows in high-throughput environments
- Implement imitation learning pipelines to rapidly onboard new ingredients from minimal demonstrations, reducing manual tuning
- Integrate research prototypes into production systems, working closely with robotics software engineers on real-world deployment
Minimum Qualifications
- MS/PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field, OR Bachelor's + 7+ years industry experience5+ years hands-on experience implementing RL/IL algorithms for robotics applications
- Expert knowledge building and deploying RL systems (policy gradients, actor-critic, model-based RL) and IL methods (behavioral cloning, inverse RL)
- Strong software engineering skills with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), Python, and robotics frameworks (ROS)
Preferred Qualifications
- Publications at top robotics/AI conferences on RL/IL implementations (ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, NeurIPS, ICML)
- Experience building multi-agent RL, hierarchical RL, or meta-learning systems for robotics
- Hands-on experience with sim-to-real transfer, domain adaptation, and sample-efficient learning for manipulation
- Background implementing RL/IL for manufacturing automation, contact-rich manipulation, or similar domains
- Strong systems engineering skills and experience with distributed training and inference
$150,000 - $260,000 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.
Equal Opportunity Employer
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizen status, uniform service member and veteran status, marital status, age, pregnancy status, protected medical condition, genetic information, disability, or any other protected status.
Multiple studies have found that a higher percentage of women and BIPOC candidates won't apply if they don't meet every listed qualification. Chef values candidates of all backgrounds. If you find yourself excited by our mission but you don't check every box in the description, we encourage you to apply anyway!
