CTO - CookUnity

About CookUnity

CookUnity is a chef-to-you marketplace connecting talented chefs with consumers, revolutionizing meal delivery. We bring small-batch, restaurant-quality meals to eaters nationwide, crafted by a diverse collective of all-star chefs. With over 100 inspired chefs from cities like NYC, LA, Austin, and more, our weekly subscription offers a wide range of hand-crafted meals to cater to various palates and dietary preferences.

By delivering over 1 million meals per month, we're also empowering working chefs, tripling their income, and supporting their growth. CookUnity believes in fueling stronger communities, partnering with Food Bank For New York City to combat food insecurity across all five boroughs.

We are seeking a visionary and accomplished Chief Technology Officer to spearhead the transformation of CookUnity's engineering team and elevate our operational scale across the United States. As a pivotal senior leader, you will be the driving force behind our transition from a "very good" to a "world-class" engineering culture. Your role will encompass mentoring and empowering our current engineering leads, fostering a culture of excellence, and inspiring the team with your technical acumen and strategic insights. If you are passionate about guiding teams to reach their full potential and are ready to shape the future of CookUnity, we want to hear from you.

The role:

The role oversees our engineering team (including product engineers, platform engineers, mobile engineers, data engineers, and our devops team) as well as our Quality team and Data Science team. You'll report to our Founder/CEO, and, as a key leader in the company, you'll partner closely with the Leadership Team to deliver a breakthrough experience.

We care deeply about helping our customers eat better and believe the key is a simple, habit-forming subscription with the widest variety of high-quality meals available. We have designed our whole strategy around this.

To achieve our goals, our subscription platform must scale efficiently without becoming overly complex. Simultaneously, our personalization engine needs to understand our customers so well that they are confident they will love their meals every week As a company that primarily delivers "atoms" not just "bits", we also need to master the operational intricacies of ingredient sourcing, production, and fulfillment logistics.

Responsibilities:

• Actively participate in the company-level quarterly planning process and lead setting OKRs for the engineering organization.
• Collaborate with other product development partners to set long-term and short-term roadmaps, and execution.
• Increase velocity to support business innovation and rapid experimentation with a healthy balance of quality and excellence.
• Provide the rest of the organization transparency into the development process, challenges, and opportunities.
• Attract, develop, and retain world-class engineering talent passionate about our mission. Establish accountability within teams, focusing on measurable output and results.
• Determine the best way to balance people and budget across our key product development centers in NYC and Buenos Aires, as well as how we should further incorporate remote talent.
• Anticipate challenges and bottlenecks in the next phases of growth and map out "the right" solutions to address those without unnecessarily over-investing.
• Provide thought leadership on our data infrastructure and the best way to leverage data to deliver delightful experiences for our customers.
• Build on what has worked well with our existing culture while challenging the norms holding us back from achieving our mission and vision.
• Drive technological innovation to support our complex ingredient sourcing, production, and fulfillment logistics.
• Lead the migration from the remaining legacy technology stack to the latest stack.
• Design and implement a scalable microservices architecture capable of handling 100k-1m requests per minute.
• Drive R&D initiatives to keep CookUnity at the forefront of food tech innovation. Adopt and invest in AI aggressively.
• Implement a full software testing lifecycle to ensure clean codebases and bug-free releases.
• Instate policies and design patterns across IT departments to ensure code quality and consistency.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development and engineering leadership experience
• Proven track record of scaling an engineering organization from 30 to 200+ people
• Leadership experience at a startup with the poise needed to inspire composure in others during stressful times
• Strong background in marketplaces or complex e-commerce fulfillment/operational businesses
• Experience leading distributed global teams, particularly in Latin America
• Demonstrated excellence in building strong relationships and effectively collaborating with cross-functional teams and stakeholders, ensuring seamless integration and alignment across the organization.
• A deep interest in and passion for CookUnity's mission to change the way we eat and how Chefs cook
• Demonstrated ability to balance business priorities with technological advancement
• History of successfully migrating legacy systems to modern architectures
• Expertise in building and scaling microservices infrastructures

The Ideal Tech Leader we're looking for, should:

• Share a passion for CookUnity's mission to transform the culinary landscape
• Navigate the complexities of a rapidly growing startup environment
• Make strategic decisions on when to prioritize business needs vs. technological advancements
• Implement efficient processes for continuous integration and deployment
• Foster a culture of innovation, quality, and data-driven decision-making
• Communicate technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Commit to staying current with emerging technologies and industry trends

If you are passionate about using cutting-edge technology to transform the food industry and have a proven history of scaling engineering teams and infrastructure, we want to connect with you.

Benefits

  Health Insurance coverage

⛱ PTO policy and paid sick days

 We grow, you grow: Stock Options Plan granted on Day 1.

 Eligible for a bi-annual performance bonus.

 401k Plan.

Family leave: 12 weeks for primary caregiver and 6 weeks for secondary caregiver, fully paid

 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises

 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly

‍♀️ Wellness perks: access to a nutritional coach and fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle

‍ Personalized Spanish coach

Awesome opportunity to join a company that's looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!