As a Lead Process Engineer on the Tovala team, you will be charged with scaling operations as well as finding and implementing efficiencies and optimizations across our entire operation. You’ll be responsible for designing and executing food manufacturing processes that will allow our facility to produce more efficiently, while enabling product variants, higher quality and lower costs. You will focus on our food operations team’s process and plans in order to ensure our facility has the correct layout and the labor is performing the correct tasks and the correct time.

About You

• You have a BS degree in Engineering or a related field.

• Minimum of 3 years’ experience managing process improvement teams in a food manufacturing environment.  Added bonus if it is in an environment with diverse products and rapid changes to the end product.

• You have experience devising and implementing strategies that yield efficiencies and optimize processes.

• You have experience managing people.

• You believe in taking a data-centric approach to decision making.

• You’re a team player willing to wear multiple hats and get your hands dirty.

• You’ve worked at a small-to-medium sized company or in a small-group work environment.

• You want to work in an environment that takes a people-first approach; values humility, integrity and ambition; and is focused on creating a culture that keeps people happy and challenged.

• You live in Chicago or are willing to move.

About the Role

As a member of our operations team, you will help build a world-class, state of the art food operation that delivers convenient, delicious and healthy food to our customers nationwide.  You would report to our VP of Hardware and Operations and work with him to devise projects to make our process better, cheaper and faster. You would spearhead those projects, manage the people involved, and ensure that we are constantly measuring and tracking the effectiveness of each project. You’d work with industry leaders that have already figured a lot of this out to see what we can learn from others.

Our ultimate goal for our food operation is to have one of the most streamlined, automated processes in the world. We believe we can achieve that because we are as much a technology company as we are a food company – and we plan to use our engineers to bring a unique perspective to our food operation.

You would be tasked with working with our engineers to leverage their skills and expertise to help us build tools (both digital and physical) and create processes to make everything work better. This will run the gamut from how/where we source our products to leveraging different shipping methods/technologies to replicating processes across multiple, nationwide production facilities.

About Tovala

Tovala is an incredibly smart oven that is paired with a companion meal delivery service that makes home cooking easy. We are a start-up company that has been featured in the WSJ, TechCrunch, Forbes, Food & Wine and more.

Why Work With Us?

1. We are at the forefront of the food-tech revolution – and have a chance to improve the way millions of people eat.

2. The opportunity to help build a company from the ground up.

3. We’re a small, close team that loves to travel, have fun, work hard, enjoy life, drink, eat, and try new things.

4. Our diverse team of engineers, designers, chefs, marketers and business-people creates an amazing environment of innovation and learning.

5. We value balance in our lives. As a company we believe in sprinting for important periods of time, then taking time to clear our minds away from work.

6. Working for a food-tech company has its perks, including tons of “R&D” food, healthcare benefits and liberal vacation.