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Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation

Chef Robotics· Engineering – Autonomy
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San Francisco, CA$180k - $280kFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Senior ML Engineer role focused on learning systems for autonomous food manipulation, enabling robots to pick, place, and handle diverse food items with multiple end effectors. On-site in San Francisco, full-time, five days a week.

Responsibilities

  • Design and train manipulation policies — behavior cloning, imitation learning, and RL — for dexterous food handling across diverse item classes and end effector types (suction, parallel jaw, multi-finger)
  • Implement and evaluate modern policy architectures (diffusion policies, transformer-based action models, action chunking) and adapt them to Chef's specific food manipulation challenges
  • Work with the platform team to build data collection pipelines using teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and autonomous rollouts; work with the data team on dataset curation, augmentation, and training infrastructure
  • Define evaluation metrics and regression benchmarks that accurately predict real-world manipulation performance; build recovery and fallback behaviors that handle dropped items, mis-grasps, and partial occlusions gracefully
  • Partner with perception and robotics engineers to validate end-to-end grasp-to-place performance across new food classes, and end effector configurations

Qualifications

  • MS or PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a closely related field — or equivalent practical experience
  • 5+ years of experience developing and deploying ML systems for robotics manipulation, visuomotor control, or robot learning
  • Deep expertise in at least two of: imitation learning, reinforcement learning, grasp estimation, or learned motion generation
  • Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable, production-quality training and evaluation pipelines
  • Hands-on experience deploying policies to real robotic hardware — not just simulation results
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python; ability to write maintainable, well-tested code across research and production codebases
  • Track record of owning projects end-to-end: from problem framing through field deployment and iteration

Skills

Required:Manipulation policy designImitation learningReinforcement learningPyTorch
Nice to have:Grasp estimationLearned motion generation

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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