About CloudChef
CloudChef’s autonomous cooking platform replaces human skill and judgment in cooking with AI, sensors, and appliance actuators democratizing access to the world’s best foods.
Our low-cost, easy-to-install upgrade on existing kitchen appliances enables low-skilled, contextless labor to replicate Michelin-star dishes more accurately than Michelin-star kitchens themselves.
Top institutional caterers, meal kit companies and hotels are using CloudChef to license and cook dishes from across the world without the need for skilled labor.
We are based in Palo Alto, California backed by several marquee investors like Susan Wojcicki(CEO of YouTube), Claire Hughes Johnson(COO of Stripe), Rocketship.vc, Tom Colicchio, etc.
🚀 While our initial focus is on commercial kitchens, our long-term goal is to make any dish from anywhere accessible to anyone.
Imagine being able to eat Gordon Ramsay’s burgers in San Jose or even your grandma’s favorite dish from half-way across the world!
Video Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSilM6XoWek
The Role
Summary
As the lead hardware engineer you will be at the forefront of robotics and software entering kitchens. You will be responsible for the end to end design, manufacturing and integration of key hardware modules like IoT knobs, sensing systems and humanoid robots.
The modules are used by diverse teams in harsh commercial kitchen environments - which means longevity, reliability, safety and ease of installation in hardware are critical.
In this role you will
- Design “Ikea like” assembly modules and hardware for deployment across commercial kitchens in the country. Generalized to be compatible with different kinds of kitchens
- Be responsible for hardware products from prototyping to manufacturing and integration across mechanical, electronics and firmware.
- Optimize the cost and install time of deployments
- Monitor, maintain and improve 100’s of deployed hardware modules with health status and other error logs
- Own technical specifications and manufacturing pipeline for all hardware products
Tech Stack
- Onshape (preferred) / Solidworks for Mechanical Design
- PCB design tools such as Eagle (preferred), Altium Designer or KiCad for the design of 2-4 layer boards.
- ESP-IDF or Arduino framework for ESP32/ESP8266 firmware development
- Wifi and BLE communication architectures
About You
- 4+ years experience in running the design, prototyping, manufacturing and integration cycle for hardware and electronic modules at a scale of 1000+ units.
- Working across the entire stack of mechanical design, electronics, and firmware excites you.
- Proficient with CAD and PCB design tools, firmware development for WiFi and BLE architectures
- You have a good understanding of manufacturing processes - e.g. machining, 3d printing, injection molding, sheet metal, weldments, casting, etc.
- Current with emerging technologies that will unlock new user experiences and features
- You like to understand the entire system you’re working with and making multidisciplinary trade-offs - e.g. choosing distributed compute architecture considering reliability and harsh commercial kitchen conditions
- You have shipped production hardware and pride yourself on making robust assemblies that last for years.
- Proficient with first article PCBA and harness work. Implement quality control measures to verify the accuracy and functionality of prototypes and assemblies
- Strong desire to up-skill and grow fast, thrive when handed responsibilities
Total Compensation -
Competitive Comp + ESOPs
Location -
Palo Alto, CA
The Team -
CloudChef was founded by Nikhil, Atish, and Mohit - friends from IIT Bombay, to originally solve their own problem - living away from home, couldn’t eat from thier favorite restaurants or even home food.
We have intentionally kept a small team. We believe that we can de-risk our business most effectively at this stage by being a small team of driven builders - who take ownership of large chunks of work.
The core team members of CloudChef are Nikhil, Mohit, Atish, Sikander, Georgi, Prateek