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Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead

Chef Robotics San Francisco Today

engineering

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

We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for the core software platform that powers our production robotic systems. This role owns the on-robot software stack end to end, from Linux-based platform software and robotics middleware through fleet management, deployment, and cloud connectivity.

You'll work across software and data engineering, partnering closely with Autonomy, Hardware, Product, and Field Operations to deliver production-ready robotic systems for Tier 1 food production customers.

Technical Architecture & Platform Leadership

Define and evolve the architecture for on-robot software, including OS configuration, hardware abstraction, middleware, and system services

Lead middleware architecture decisions for real-time robot control, sensor integration, and inter-process communication

Establish patterns for full-stack development, connecting on-robot systems to cloud services and web interfaces

Hands-On Engineering

Write production code for high-impact features across the stack: robotics middleware, backend services, and cloud infrastructure

Lead critical technical initiatives, including robotic platform software, cloud data pipelines, and fleet management platform

Build robust deployment, monitoring, and OTA update systems for production robot fleets

Debug the most challenging issues from kernel/driver level through the application layer

Engineering Excellence & Mentorship

Establish engineering standards and processes that balance rigor with startup agility

Champion reliability, observability, and testing practices across embedded and cloud systems

Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing sessions

Collaborate with Hardware and Autonomy teams on system integration and performance optimization

Build and maintain internal and developer tooling that acts as a force multiplier across the organization

Required Qualification

8+ years of software engineering with 3+ years in technical leadership roles

Track record delivering production robotic systems, IoT devices, or autonomous systems at scale

Experience designing reliable systems for B2B/enterprise deployments

On-device platform expertise: OS configuration, device drivers, system services, networking stack configuration

Robotics middleware: ROS/ROS2, real-time systems, sensor integration

Infrastructure: Containerization (Docker/K8s), CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability

Nice to have

Collaborative robots (Universal Robots UR5E or similar cobots)

Over-the-air update systems and remote device management at scale

Background in manufacturing/production environments

Track record at high-growth hardware/robotics startups

Cloud experience: AWS/GCP/Azure

Full-stack development: Backend services (Python/C++), APIs, database design, web interfaces

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!