Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead

Chef Robotics•San Francisco, CA

17h

About The Position

About Our Team Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world. As the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT has shown, AI has the potential to drive immense change. However, we believe AI’s biggest impact will be in the physical world, given industries like manufacturing, food, and transportation represent 90% of global GDP. We're starting with food, with a goal to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen in the world. We have signed multiple multi-year contracts with various large food companies and we are growing fast. We're backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg BETA and Promus Ventures. We have a great team, where you will be surrounded by talented engineers and tech leaders from companies like Cruise, Zoox, Google, Verb Surgical, Tesla, Nuro, Vicarious, Amazon Robotics, Strateos, Built Robotics, Facebook, Plenty, Yelp, and Microsoft. About the Role We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for the core software platform that powers our production robotic systems. This role owns the on-robot software stack end to end, from Linux-based platform software and robotics middleware through fleet management, deployment, and cloud connectivity. You'll work across software and data engineering, partnering closely with Autonomy, Hardware, Product, and Field Operations to deliver production-ready robotic systems for Tier 1 food production customers.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering with 3+ years in technical leadership roles
Track record delivering production robotic systems, IoT devices, or autonomous systems at scale
Experience designing reliable systems for B2B/enterprise deployments
On-device platform expertise: OS configuration, device drivers, system services, networking stack configuration
Robotics middleware: ROS/ROS2, real-time systems, sensor integration
Infrastructure: Containerization (Docker/K8s), CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability

Nice To Haves

Collaborative robots (Universal Robots UR5E or similar cobots)
Over-the-air update systems and remote device management at scale
Background in manufacturing/production environments
Track record at high-growth hardware/robotics startups
Cloud experience: AWS/GCP/Azure
Full-stack development: Backend services (Python/C++), APIs, database design, web interfaces

Responsibilities

Technical Architecture & Platform Leadership Define and evolve the architecture for on-robot software, including OS configuration, hardware abstraction, middleware, and system services
Lead middleware architecture decisions for real-time robot control, sensor integration, and inter-process communication
Establish patterns for full-stack development, connecting on-robot systems to cloud services and web interfaces
Hands-On Engineering Write production code for high-impact features across the stack: robotics middleware, backend services, and cloud infrastructure
Lead critical technical initiatives, including robotic platform software, cloud data pipelines, and fleet management platform
Build robust deployment, monitoring, and OTA update systems for production robot fleets
Debug the most challenging issues from kernel/driver level through the application layer
Engineering Excellence & Mentorship Establish engineering standards and processes that balance rigor with startup agility
Champion reliability, observability, and testing practices across embedded and cloud systems
Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing sessions
Collaborate with Hardware and Autonomy teams on system integration and performance optimization
Build and maintain internal and developer tooling that acts as a force multiplier across the organization