Senior ML Engineer Jobs in California

INTRODUCTION

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

The next leap in food robotics won't come from hand-tuned policies for individual ingredients — it will come from foundation models that generalize across thousands of food types, kitchen configurations, and manipulation scenarios out of the box. At Chef, we're building that model: the Food Foundation Model. As a Senior ML Engineer, Foundation Models, you will work at the frontier of large-scale robot learning: training and fine-tuning the Food Foundation Model, building the data infrastructure that feeds it, and deploying it onto physical robots in production kitchens. You'll bridge research and engineering — translating advances from the latest policy learning, generative modeling, and world model literature into systems that handle real food, with real end effectors, at real throughput. Your models won't just benchmark well; they'll serve millions of meals. We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.

YOUR ROLE AND 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

BASIC 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

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience with world models or generative models for robot planning and prediction
- Background in large-scale distributed training (multi-node GPU clusters, FSDP, DeepSpeed)
- Familiarity with simulation environments (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, Genesis) for synthetic data generation and domain randomization
- Experience deploying models to edge hardware (ONNX, TensorRT, quantization, performance profiling)
- Prior work with contact-rich manipulation, deformable object handling, or food robotics
- Publications at top venues: CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

Chef is an early-stage startup where equity is a major part of the compensation package. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. In addition to salary and early-stage equity, we offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, and vision insurance, commuter benefits, flexible paid time off (PTO), catered lunch, and 401(k) matching.