Senior Software Engineer, Robotics Platform

Chef Robotics • San Francisco, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments — and the platform they run on has to be rock-solid. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Robotics Platform team, you own the foundation: the compute, OS, middleware, and networking that everything else depends on. You'll be working on everything from low-level system software to high-bandwidth sensor data logging, debugging, and performance analysis. Ideal candidates will also be interested in overall product performance and will work closely with senior robotics and perception engineers to debug, test, and release new autonomy features. We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency — you'll lead the systems-level work that makes those features reliable in production.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, or a closely related field.
• 4+ years building production software in Linux environments, with strong systems-level expertise
• Experience shipping and maintaining software across a fleet of devices — not just individual systems
• Strong fundamentals: networking protocols (TCP, UDP, PTP), build systems, performance profiling, memory optimization
• Track record of leading complex, multi-component software projects from design to production
• Familiarity with ROS or similar robotics middleware.

Nice To Haves

• Background in fleet management, OTA update systems, or large-scale device deployment
• Full-stack or cloud infrastructure experience (monitoring, logging, observability pipelines)
• Experience using simulation for hardware-in-the-loop or regression testing
• Familiarity with basic mechatronics and electronics

Responsibilities

• Lead the upgrade of our autonomy software OS and middleware stack, across production systems
• Define software architecture standards, release processes, and testing practices for platform software
• Own fleet-wide platform reliability — diagnose and fix low-level systems issues (drivers, networking, Linux configuration) across deployed robots
• Investigate and resolve networking and load bottlenecks that affect perception and autonomy algorithm performance
• Build provisioning and configuration tooling that scales robot bring-up with manufacturing
• Integrate new hardware, sensors, and cameras into the platform; monitor performance across the fleet
• Set the bar for engineering quality — well-structured, well-tested, production-ready code

Benefits

• medical, dental, and vision insurance
• commuter benefits
• flexible paid time off (PTO)
• catered lunch
• 401(k) matching

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior