Robotics Software Test Engineer

Chef Robotics is on a mission to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food. We build AI-powered robots that assemble fresh meals at scale for some of the largest food producers in North America — companies making ready-to-eat meals for airlines, retailers, meal kits, and the frozen food aisle.

Our robots operate in high-mix, high-variability production environments where ingredients change shape, color, and consistency from one tray to the next. Solving this requires tightly coupled perception, manipulation, and learning — and a team that ships hardware-software systems into customer facilities and keeps them running.

Headquartered in San Francisco, we are a venture-backed team of robotics, ML, and operations engineers building the foundation for general-purpose food robotics.

About the Role

Chef Robotics is building autonomous robots that work alongside humans in commercial food preparation environments — and a software regression in production isn't just a bug, it's a missed meal, a stopped line, or a customer incident. As a Robotics Software Test Engineer, you own the quality bar for our entire robot software stack: perception, autonomy, platform, and the integrations between them.

This is a builder role, not a manual QA role. You'll design and implement the test infrastructure, CI/CD gates, and hardware-in-the-loop validation systems that let a small team ship fast without breaking things in the field. You'll work directly with perception and robotics engineers — embedded in the team, not downstream of it — and your test frameworks will be first-class engineering artifacts.

We are a small, high-ownership team. We work onsite five days a week and move with startup urgency.

In this role, you will::
• Design and implement automated test plans, test cases, and fixtures across the full robot software stack — from unit tests to system-level integration tests

• Build and own hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test infrastructure that validates perception, robotics, and platform software against real or simulated hardware

• Strengthen and extend CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early and gate releases with high confidence

• Define quality metrics and release readiness criteria; track test coverage, failure trends, and fleet health to give the team clear signal

• Investigate and root-cause production failures across software, hardware, and system boundaries; build regression tests to prevent recurrence

• Develop simulation-based test environments to validate perception and robotics changes before deploying to physical robots

• Participate in design and code reviews with a lens on testability, observability, and failure modes

• Instrument the robot software stack for better debuggability and post-hoc failure analysis

What You Bring::
• 3+ years of experience in software test engineering, reliability engineering, or a closely related role

• Strong Python skills

• Hands-on experience designing and building test infrastructure — not just writing tests, but building the systems that run them

• Experience with CI/CD systems and integrating automated testing into release pipelines

• Strong debugging instincts — able to trace failures across software layers, hardware interfaces, and timing boundaries

• Solid understanding of testing methodologies across unit, integration, system, and hardware-in-the-loop layers

• Comfort working in Linux-based development and production environments

• Self-starter who can prioritize independently in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment

Nice-to-have::
• Experience testing robotics software stacks (ROS, perception pipelines, control systems)

• Familiarity with simulation environments (Gazebo, Isaac Sim) for test scenario generation

• Experience with Docker or containerized test environments

• Background in data logging, observability pipelines, or fleet monitoring systems

• Knowledge of networking protocols relevant to robotics (TCP/UDP, PTP, gRPC)

• Experience with hardware bring-up, sensor calibration, or embedded systems testing

• Prior work in fast-paced robotics or hardware startups