Applications Engineering Manager

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

Chef Robotics is seeking a strong leader to scale Chef’s ability and capacity to successfully deploy robots to a growing number of customers. Application engineering at Chef includes early customer engagements, qualification, and requirements generation to ensure what we deliver meets customer expectations, collaboration with engineering to test against those requirements, managing complex deployments that meet timelines, and through it all, impressing our customers. 

The job is to:

• Build upon our existing processes to create a well-running deployment machine.

• Create the management system, tools, and automation needed to ensure customer success.

• Develop our team’s ability to engage with prospective customers to understand their current manufacturing processes, challenges, and goals, and to understand their operations as well as they do. 

• Improve our customer operations through a deep technical and operational review of both the Chef Robotics Systems and the customer operations.

This is both a hands-on and a management role. You will manage a team of application engineers and directly interact with customers.

You will be a key leader and critical to the company's success. You should have a successful track record of scaling customer deployments, ideally robots in manufacturing or similar industries. You should have been the leader who delivered at scale and demonstrated customer success. You are passionate about robotics, manufacturing automation, and working with customers. You have a strong track record of successful customer engagements, from pre-sales engineering through deployment.

You know how to manage your time, are self-driven, capable of figuring out what needs to be done, scheduling, and executing to customer needs. You know how to deal with difficult situations when customers are not satisfied, when your company or product is challenged, you know how to manage customer expectations and drive your company's organization to drive product or operational improvements.

Since we have customers across the US and Canada this job requires up to 33% travel. And since you will be the face of the company dealing directly with customers this position requires excellent communication necessary for developing and maintaining good internal and external relations. You should have excellent interpersonal communication skills with the ability to handle high-stakes, high-pressure customer interactions professionally and engagingly. 

You have the technical chops to lead an engineering team and to do your hands-on work. You should have done it before, not just sat next to the guy who did it. You must be a self-starter who can work effectively with others in a small high-energy team focused on results and hitting deadlines. You should have the following experience and skills

In this role, you will:

• Engagement with the customer’s engineers and manufacturing leaders to model how the Chef’s Robotics System would be built into the customer's manufacturing line. 
• Using these models to build an ROI case by quantifying the manufacturing process improvements that the robots can achieve. 
• Work with Sales and Business Development to help close a customer, addressing customer feature requests, questions, and technical risks, and overall get buy-in from a technology perspective.
• Build a deployment process and manage the deployments for each new customer.
• Lead the in-field deployment of Chef Systems at customer sites through Site Acceptance Test.
• Once the system is deployed, help lead customer success for that stakeholder so that they have a wonderful experience and buy more robots. 
• Researching, developing, and modifying products to meet customers' technical requirements and needs.
• Identifying areas for improvement and communicating these issues, as well as possible solutions, to upper management.

What You Bring:

• Proven track record of leading a successful deployment group at scale. 
• Prior experience with at least one of the following areas: product engineering, applications engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, forward-deployed engineering.
• BS, MS, in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Recognize, communicate, and properly document product issues, complaints, and improvements.
• Prefer experience in manufacturing automation or a similar industry.

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!