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 110 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 a customer site. 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; triaging, troubleshooting remotely, documenting, and escalating issues across our deployed fleet.

In this role, you’ll work in the office communicating with customers’ operations teams to understand issues on site, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix based on playbooks and deploy fixes or mitigations. When help is needed you will lead escalations to Systems Support Engineers and Applications Engineers. Further, you will work with the Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance and to develop and test new tasks for the robot leading to 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 stream. In this role, you’ll be responsible for managing one of the core drivers of the company’s success, our relationships with our customers. If you’re excited about working in a customer-facing role on hard technical problems and you thrive in the fast-paced, dynamic environment of an early-stage startup, we’d love to hear from you. Please note that this is a customer facing role and works during off-hours.

This position is a 4 day workweek (weekend shift). The shift is from Fri-Mon from 6 am - 4 pm PST.

What You'll Do

• Investigate customer issues, triage incoming tickets with relevant data, investigate to determine a fix and deploy fixes or mitigations
• Perform remote diagnostics: guide on-site operators or field technicians through troubleshooting steps via company portal and internal tools.
• Track and log hardware requests, part numbers, and part quantities using the hardware request workflow
• Are familiar with APIs and technical RaaS products and can deeply understand technical docs with ease
• Have demonstrated an ability to thrive in fast-paced, reactive situations while meeting core support metrics targets (e.g. CSAT, SLA, etc.)
• Possess strong user empathy and are expert in the lifecycle of a support case; you can read between the lines of a user’s question, put yourself in their shoes, and get at the heart of their needs for a speedy, satisfying resolution
• Write and maintain internal external documentation: runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and FAQ articles based on real ticket patterns
• Collaborate with Chef’s Systems Support and Application teams to prioritize to resolve production blocking issues
• Work with 3P Technicians to coordinate break/fix at a Customer Site
• Keep customer portal tidy: maintain accurate ticket states, flag duplicates, and close resolved issues
• Work with Chef’s Customer Support Manager to improve existing performance

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• Minimum 1 years experience in a customer-facing role in applications engineering, deployment, solutions engineering, or similar roles
• Prior experience in API integrations for Support tooling development
• Comfort with command line interfaces and basic scripting (Bash, Python, JavaScript)
• Demonstrated track record of shipping products quickly and efficiently
• Able to work independently and with minimal supervision
• Ability to travel at least 20% of your time is required
• Must be available to work a flexible schedule to support customers, including on-call hours
• Familiar with Linux/Unix and/or Robot Operating System (ROS); Python or Linux experience is a plus
• Strong communications and project management skills to recognize, communicate, and properly document product issues, complaints and improvements

Preferred

• Bilingual English/Spanish - A large number of our customer on-site teams operate in Spanish

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.