Senior Perception Engineer
Chef Robotics· Engineering – Autonomy
San Francisco$170k - $240kfull-timePosted 5mo ago
About the role
Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots for commercial food preparation environments, focusing on perception to enable reliable real-time operation on the factory floor. The role encompasses end-to-end ML lifecycle, real-time inference, data pipelines, and collaboration with robotics, hardware, and software teams to deploy production-ready perception systems.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Qualifications
- 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.
- Strong Python skills; experience building production-quality, maintainable code — not just research prototypes.
- Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch strongly preferred) and the full training pipeline from data to deployed model.
- Experience working with RGBD sensors, depth cameras, and point cloud data.
- Proven ability to build and optimize models for low-latency, real-time inference.
- Familiarity with ROS or similar robotics middleware.
Skills
Required:Deep learning model design and optimizationLow-latency real-time inferenceMulti-object trackingData pipeline and ML lifecycle
Benefits
- medical, dental, and vision insurance
- commuter benefits
- flexible paid time off (PTO)
- catered lunch
- 401(k) matching
Last updated Jul 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Chef Robotics
AI-enabled robots for the food industry
Chef Robotics provides the industry’s first flexible labor equivalent, helping food manufacturers increase throughput, reduce food giveaway, and improve consistency.
AI-enabled robotsfood industryrobotics as a service
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