Senior Robotics Release and Test Engineer

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

As the Senior Robotics Release and Test Engineer, you will serve as the critical liaison between development and production, ensuring robotic systems adhere to stringent performance benchmarks prior to deployment in commercial facilities. The role entails ownership of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, the implementation of performance gating mechanisms, and the maintenance of time critical operations imperative for efficient food automation workflows in every release.

• Develop and manage comprehensive CI/CD pipelines for robotics software, inclusive of hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Institute automated performance gates to validate the operational speed, accuracy, and reliability of robots.
• Formulate release procedures to encompass both software updates and robot firmware deployments.
• Administer staged deployment strategies, such as canary and blue-green deployments, for production systems.
• Integrate validation with other equipment such as conveyor systems within deployment pipelines.

• Generate automated performance benchmarks to be executed as an integral component of each release.
• Deploy regression detection systems to identify performance degradation at an early stage.
• Establish real-time monitoring of pivotal performance metrics in production environments.

• Engage with development teams to assimilate performance considerations into feature development processes.
• Partner with performance engineers to translate performance requirements into automated test protocols.
• Coordinate release schedules with customer operations and field teams.
• Disseminate information regarding performance enhancements and challenges to relevant stakeholders.
• Facilitate effective communication and understanding among mechanical, electrical, and software engineering teams.

• Develop monitoring systems to track robot performance across various customer systems.
• Establish alerting thresholds for performance anomalies detected in production environments.
• Create dashboards to visualize robot uptime, throughput, and packaging quality metrics.
• Conduct post-release performance analysis and formulate recommendations for improvement.
• Implement predictive maintenance monitoring for components of the packaging line.

• Minimum of 6 years of professional experience in release engineering, DevOps, or platform engineering roles.
• Proficient utilization of CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with performance testing frameworks and tools.
• Expertise in scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash).Comprehension of performance characteristics inherent in robotics and real-time systems.

• Thorough understanding of release management best practices and deployment methodologies.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).Knowledge of identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP) and edge computing paradigms.
• Understanding of conveyor systems and production line orchestration.

• Previous experience with robotic systems or industrial automation deployments.
• Experience with distributed systems and challenges related to edge deployment.
• Expertise in packaging line optimization.

$150,000 - $180,000 a year

Chef is an early-stage startup where equity is a major part of the compensation package. As the company secures more capital, we will gradually increase salary and cash compensation. The starting salary will depend on seniority.

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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizen status, uniform service member and veteran status, marital status, age, pregnancy status, protected medical condition, genetic information, disability, or any other protected status.

Multiple studies have found that a higher percentage of women and BIPOC candidates won't apply if they don't meet every listed qualification. Chef values candidates of all backgrounds. If you find yourself excited by our mission but you don't check every box in the description, we encourage you to apply anyway!