What are the responsibilities and job description for the Head of Hardware position at Chef Robotics?
Chef Robotics is accelerating the deployment of intelligent machines in the physical world, starting with food production—a sector facing the largest labor shortage in the U.S., with 1.14M unfilled jobs today and 3.1M projected by 2030. These roles cannot be offshored, making robotics essential to keeping production onshore and strengthening America’s manufacturing base. Backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, and Promus Ventures, and supported by a world-class team from companies such as Cruise, Zoox, Google, Tesla, and Amazon Robotics, Chef is rapidly scaling with multiple multi-year contracts and a mission to put an intelligent robot in every commercial kitchen.
In this role, you'll be a partner to lead the hardware engineering team (and, depending on the candidate, perhaps also the manufacturing/supply chain team). Our next goal is to build and scale to 1,000 robot systems worldwide.
- Oversee Chef's hardware engineering org
- Help execute as a player coach
- Help expand the set of ingredients that Chef can manipulate (e.g., sticky cheese, fruit, piece picking, etc.)
- Help design and build Chef's next-gen system
- Help improve reliability / MTBF for Chef's current systems in the field
- Help reduce BOM
- Help set technical direction for HW team
- (Depending on the candidate) Oversee Chef's manufacturing and supply chain team and help scale to 250, 500, and then 1000 robots in production.
- Help be on Chef's leadership team. Represent HW team and also help Chef make the right company-level decisions.
- Help hire and build a team as needed
- Help fundraise
- Masters or Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or physics
- Has shipped 3 (at least 2) products to market
- Has seen at least one product scale to tens of thousands of users/customers
- Has lead manufacturing (or managed someone who lead manufacturing)
- Has lead supply chain and procurement (or managed someone who lead supply chain and procurement)
- Has 10 years of production engineering experience as an IC, tech lead, or manager
- Has managed and lead teams in: Manufacturing, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Firmware
- Has worked with Perception / computer vision, Machine learning, Robotics motion planning and control
- Has been a manager of a team of engineers and a manager of managers (two layers)
- Has been part of at least one startup
- Has scaled an engineering team from 5 people to 15 to 45 people
- Understand the business logic and the business
- Can sell and convince top A-level hires to join the company
- Can represent the company and sell the company to investors for prospective investors
- Can be onsite in our SF office