Senior ML Engineer, Manipulation
AI summary of the role
Senior ML Engineer owning learning systems for dexterous food manipulation on production robots.
What you’ll do
- Design and train manipulation policies (behavior cloning, imitation learning, RL) for dexterous food handling across diverse item classes and end effector types
- Implement and evaluate modern policy architectures (diffusion policies, transformer-based action models, action chunking) adapted to food manipulation
- Build data collection pipelines with teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and autonomous rollouts; collaborate on dataset curation and training infrastructure
- Define evaluation metrics and regression benchmarks predicting real-world manipulation performance; build recovery behaviors for dropped items and mis-grasps
What you’ll bring
- MS or PhD in Robotics, ML, CS, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years 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 production-quality training/evaluation pipelines
Technologies
PyTorch · imitation learning · reinforcement learning · diffusion policies · transformer-based action models · action chunking · teleoperation · kinesthetic teaching · MuJoCo · Isaac Sim · TensorRT · VLA models
About Chef Robotics
AI-enabled robots that automate high-mix food assembly for manufacturers using adaptable manipulation software and a robotics-as-a-service deployment model.
Series A · 100–200 people
Source and classification
Production engineering · Evidence for this classification:
Chef Robotics is bringing AI into the physical world, starting with one of the world’s largest industries: food manufacturing. Food production faces one of the most severe labor shortages in the US, with more than 1 million open jobs today and demand continuing to grow. Our robots help manufacturers automate repetitive food-preparation and assembly tasks so they can increase throughput, improve consistency, and keep production onshore. Today, Chef robots operate in production facilities across North America and Europe, serving customers including Amy’s Kitchen, gategroup, and CookUnity. Our robots have made over 100 million servings in production, creating the world’s largest proprietary dataset for AI-powered manipulation of deformable food. Every meal our robots produce makes the system smarter. Backed by leading investors including Avataar Ventures, Construct Capital, BloombergHow jobs are selected
Employer postings · Data from · Sources