Why We’re Hiring a Developer Operations Engineer and a Full Stack Engineer
by Josh Patchus, Chief Data Scientist
When I started at Cava over a year ago I saw a lot of empty space that needed to be filled. I saw an industry that greatly lagged others. I would go to tech meetups and tech conferences and people would ask me, “Why does a restaurant or culinary brand need a Chief Data Scientist?”
I’ve always just chuckled and said, “Why wouldn’t they need one?”
I’ve always found that question to be funny, but it has always been obvious to me why we needed one. That is not always obvious to others.
The greatest advances in technology don’t necessarily come from our understanding of needing them.
Twenty years ago, I don’t think people thought our social networks were broken. I’m sure they didn’t think we struggled to find new music or TV shows, and they almost surely didn’t think we needed new ways to search this thing called the Internet. The advances in technology will not always be obvious to us, but we need to find a way to interact with our food through tech. Our time is becoming more precious and our food tastes are expanding rapidly every day. Cava is a vehicle for access to healthier eating, which hasn’t been so available in the fast-food landscape of America. Time, taste, health — these are just three examples of shifting needs, but how do we harvest information about all of these needs and more, and then solve them? The answer is simple: we build the technology.
Why don’t you just hire a series of companies to do that?
We do when there is something that existed before. We use R-Shiny to help us report our data, we use AWS and dedicated infrastructure to store our data, and we use basic statistical techniques to analyze our data. The bigger problem is this: For a lot of the challenges that need to be addressed, there just isn’t a full out-of-the-box solution to achieve what we need. If we are to do this properly, we want to be on the forefront of technology, and we need to be using the greatest tools out there. Out-of-the-box solutions will get us about halfway to what we want, but that next half is nearly impossible. We will be building tools that are pushing ourselves and hopefully our industry to new heights.
Modern times demand modern technology.
Over the past ten years consumers have become more interested in syncing technology to their daily activities. The internet of things has made us more conscious about how many steps we take, how many calories we burn in a day, or how much sleep we get in a night. Consumers are demanding a working relationship with technology. At Cava we know this, and our focus is always customer first. We will provide our customers with this technology to help them make more informed decisions or to simply make their day easier. These tools, either digital or physical, show information they wish to know or maybe didn’t know they wanted to know: Where does your food come from? Who makes those pickled banana peppers in your salad? What’s the best dressing to pair with braised lamb? By answering these questions in a personal way, we’re creating a more fulfilling customer experience.
The most useful technology is rarely seen.
Sometimes the best technology ever built helps the people behind the scenes. Hadoop, React, and Bootstrap were all created to make the teams at tech companies more efficient, not to be consumer facing. At Cava we are building infrastructure to make every team more efficient and informed about the progress of the business, from giving our supply chain team a better understanding of their ecosystem, to building automated reporting tools for our accountants and executives. These tools we are building will not be obvious when you walk into a Cava Grill, but they will make everyone working at Cava a better team member and more efficient at running their own internal operations.
Technology is there, we just need to build it.
We have self driving cars, investments made by automated calculations, and apps that can tell us when the price of a flight will go up. These ideas need to be applied to the things we do everyday — like eating! We are going to enhance the way people experience and consume food using an approach that could even become industry practice. It will take a lot of work, infrastructure construction, and building things from scratch. If we are trying to harvest tomorrow’s technology, we need to start planting the seeds.
What makes Cava unique?
Have you ever had Crazy Feta? Our tasty food aside, we have a unique circumstance of stores and scale that will make Cava a leader in the field. With our growing brand of restaurants and CPG products, we are building things to scale. We are building technology that will be robust and modern, not technology that will be stuck in the past. We will work in iterative processes, because the landscape is always changing.
Sound interesting?
Learn more about working at Cava and apply! Or reach out to Josh at josh@cavagrill.com for more info.
+ more positions to come soon.
