Chef Robotics is accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food production — the sector facing the largest labor shortage in the U.S., with 1.14M unfilled jobs today and 3.1M projected by 2030. These roles can't be offshored, making robotics essential to keeping production onshore and strengthening America's manufacturing base.
Our AI-powered robots automate food prep and assembly in commercial kitchens and food manufacturing, and have already produced over 110 million meals in production — generating the world's largest proprietary dataset for deformable food manipulation. Backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, Chef is rapidly scaling with multiple multi-year contracts and a mission to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen.
About the Role
Chef is seeking Systems Support Engineers to serve as a vital link between our customers and our engineering teams. In this role, you’ll work in the office communicating with customers’ operations teams to understand issues on site, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix, and deploy fixes or mitigations. When help is needed, you will lead escalations to Engineering. Additionally, you'll be in the field to execute repairs, deploy fixes, ensure resolution, and customer satisfaction. Further, you will partner with our sales team to improve existing performance and develop and test new tasks for the robo, leading to expansion with existing customers.
This is an opportunity to leverage your deep technical expertise and passion for robotics to directly impact Continuous Improvement and Chef's revenue stream. In this role, you’ll be responsible for managing one of the core drivers of the company’s success, our relationships with our customers. If you’re excited about working in a customer-facing role on hard technical problems and you thrive in the fast-paced, dynamic environment of an early-stage startup, we’d love to hear from you. Please note that this is a customer-facing role, with deployment at our customers’ facilities at 50%-75% of the time.
In this role, you will:
- Act as the face of Chef Robotics in the field, leading the in-field deployment and support of Chef’s robotic systems at customer sites
- Investigate customer issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix and deploy fixes or mitigations
- Collaborate with Chef’s Applications and Engineering teams to prioritize to resolve production blocking issues
- Execute field break/fix hardware repairs and deploy and test new software.
- Work with Chef’s Customer Success team to improve existing performance and to develop and test new tasks for the robotServe as a touchpoint for the customer to ensure they have a great experience with our team and our product
- Willingness to be hands-on with in system break/fix
- Prepare and develop technical presentations to explain our company's products or services to customers
What You Bring:
- BS, MS, in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
- Minimum 3+ years' experience in a customer-facing role in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, or similar roles
- Prior experience in two or more of the following areas: machine learning, motion planning, robotics, computer vision, or control
- Prior experience with at least one of the following areas: product engineering, applications engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, forward deployed engineering
- Prior experience in API integrations for Support tooling development
- Demonstrated track record of shipping products quickly and efficiently
- Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
- Ability to travel at least 75% of your time is required
- Must be available to work a flexible schedule to support customers, including some weekends, nights, and on-call hours
- Familiar with Linux/Unix and/or Robot Operating System (ROS); Python or Linux experience is a plus
- Strong communications and project management skills to recognize, communicate, and properly document product issues, complaints and improvements
Chef Robotics is solving one of the hardest problems in AI and robotics — and we ship. Our robots are in production today, generating real data that trains the next generation of food AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and built by a team from Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, we're scaling fast with multiple multi-year enterprise contracts. If you want to build physical AI with real-world deployments and real impact, Chef is the place.
