Robotic Operations Engineer

Chef Robotics is the market leader in physical AI for the food industry — deploying AI-powered robots that solve one of the country's largest, most urgent labor shortages. Our fleet has produced over 120 million real meals across a dozen customer facilities in North America and Europe, for customers like Amy’s Kitchen, gategroup, and CookUnity, and every one of those meals trains our AI further. Backed by leading investors, we've proven the hardest part in robotics — real-world deployment at scale — and now we're looking for people who want to build what comes after.

About the Role

We are hiring a Robotic Operations Engineer to be the first point of contact for incoming issues at our customer sites. You’ll work from our SF office, monitoring and responding to support requests that come in through Slack, Microsoft Teams, our web portal, email, and phone. You’ll triage, troubleshoot remotely, document, and escalate issues across our deployed fleet.

In this role, you’ll communicate with customers’ operations teams to understand on-site issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix based on playbooks, and deploy fixes or mitigations. When more help is needed, you’ll lead escalations to Systems Support Engineers and Applications Engineers. You’ll also work with the Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance and to develop and test new robot tasks that drive expansion at existing customers.

This is an opportunity to use your deep technical expertise and passion for robotics while having a direct impact on continuous improvement and Chef’s revenue. You’ll own one of the core drivers of the company’s success: our relationships with our customers. If you’re excited about a customer-facing role on hard technical problems, and you thrive in the fast-paced environment of an early-stage startup, we’d love to hear from you.

This is a customer-facing role that covers off-hours.

• Shift: 4-day workweek, Friday–Monday, 6:00 am–4:00 pm PT
• Location: On-site at our San Francisco office
• On-call: Rotating on-call
• Travel: Up to 20% to customer sites, replaces shift days as needed

What You'll Do

• Investigate customer issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, determine a fix, and deploy fixes or mitigations
• Perform remote diagnostics, guiding on-site operators and field technicians through troubleshooting via our customer portal and internal tools
• Lead escalations to Systems Support and Applications Engineering, and collaborate with them to prioritize and resolve production-blocking issues
• Coordinate break/fix work with third-party technicians at customer sites
• Track and log hardware requests, part numbers, and quantities using the hardware request workflow
• Keep the customer portal tidy: maintain accurate ticket states, flag duplicates, and close resolved issues
• Write and maintain internal and external documentation, including runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and FAQ articles based on real ticket patterns
• Work with the Customer Support Manager to improve support performance and to develop and test new robot tasks

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• 1+ years in a customer-facing technical role such as applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, or technical support
• Familiarity with APIs and technical RaaS products, and the ability to quickly understand dense technical documentation
• Comfort with command line interfaces and basic scripting (Bash, Python, or JavaScript)
• Familiarity with Linux/Unix and/or Robot Operating System (ROS)
• A track record of thriving in fast-paced, reactive situations while meeting support targets such as CSAT and SLA
• Strong user empathy and command of the full support case lifecycle; you can read between the lines of a question to get to a fast, satisfying resolution
• Strong communication and project management skills to recognize, communicate, and document product issues, complaints, and improvements
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision
• Ability to travel up to 20% of the time
• Availability for a flexible schedule, including weekend shifts and on-call hours

Preferred

• Bilingual English/Spanish. Many of our customers’ on-site teams operate in Spanish, so conversational fluency is enough to walk an operator through troubleshooting.
• Experience building API integrations for support tooling
• Python development experience
• A track record of shipping tools or improvements quickly

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $90,000 – $110,000 per year.

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.