Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models
Chef Robotics· Engineering – Autonomy
San Francisco$180k - $280kFull-timePosted 4mo ago
About the role
Senior ML Engineer role focused on building and deploying the Food Foundation Model for autonomous food robotics, bridging research and production to enable generalization across food types, kitchen configurations, and manipulation scenarios in production kitchens.
Responsibilities
- Define the architecture, training objectives, and learning approach for the Food Foundation Model — evaluating tradeoffs across generalization, sample efficiency, and deployment constraints
- Investigate and evaluate the latest foundation model architectures — including VLAs, world models, JEPA-style joint embedding models, diffusion policies, and emerging approaches — and assess their applicability to Chef's manipulation and generalization challenges
- Design pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment pipelines that improve the model's ability to generalize across new food types, kitchen configurations, and end effector types with minimal retraining
- Develop evaluation frameworks that measure real-world generalization and long-horizon reliability — not just offline benchmark accuracy
- Collaborate with the data and platform teams on training data requirements, augmentation strategies, and model serving constraints
- Stay current with the research frontier — reading and critically evaluating recent work from CoRL, RSS, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR and forming clear views on what's relevant to production manipulation
Qualifications
- MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field — or equivalent industry experience
- 5+ years of experience implementing and deploying ML models for real-world robotics applications
- Hands-on experience with large-scale model training: pre-training, fine-tuning, and post-training alignment pipelines
- Familiarity with modern policy and generative model architectures — diffusion models, transformers, behavior cloning, or large-scale multimodal models
- Strong PyTorch skills and experience building reliable, production-quality training and evaluation infrastructure
- Solid software engineering fundamentals in Python; able to write maintainable code across research and production codebases
- Track record of taking models from research prototype to deployed system on physical hardware
Skills
Required:Architecture design for foundation modelsFoundation model evaluationModel pre-training, fine-tuning, alignment pipelinesEvaluation frameworks for real-world generalizationPyTorchPython software engineering
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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