Restaurant Operations Manager
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Austin, TX
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Operations
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years of relevant experience, including at least 2 managing a team
- Background in restaurants, food delivery, marketplaces, hospitality, or supply-side operations
- Experience owning a supply base or partner portfolio, spanning both acquisition and ongoing performance
- Working knowledge of restaurant operations: kitchen workflow, POS systems (Toast, Square, Clover), menu management, ticket flow
- Comfortable with data: lateness reports, dashboards, and Google Sheets should not slow you down
- Spanish is a plus given the team is based in Bogotá
- You genuinely love food, and you know your region
- Self-starter who does not wait for a lead list
- Comfortable with ambiguity: the playbook is half-written and you’ll write the rest
- High standards and low tolerance for recurring defects
- You’d rather be in a kitchen than on a call
- Willing to be in the field: facility visits, restaurant walk-ins, tastings
Full description
Who we are
At Picnic, we’re reinventing the way employees experience lunch at work. By partnering with top local restaurants and batching hundreds of orders, we make it easy for companies to offer high-quality, individually packed meals, without fees or tips. Our mission is to create a seamless, affordable, and joyful lunch experience that benefits both employees and employers.
About the role
As a Restaurant Operations Manager, you’ll own restaurant supply for the Austin region: find the right restaurants, sign the partner, and make sure they deliver: enough capacity, prepped on time, packaged properly, with menus and photos worth ordering from. That means real ownership and real accountability from day one. You’ll spend time in facilities and restaurants, tasting food and talking to operators.
What you’ll do
- Selection. Selection depth and cuisine coverage are a key KPI. You decide where it comes from: brick-and-mortar partners, standalone restaurants, and CK facility operators (with CK sales). You make sure every hub has real options at the different price tiers.
- Restaurant performance. Signing, onboarding, launch, and ongoing health. You own the capacity model, drive on-time prep, and make the pause and unpause calls. If a partner’s prep-by times slip in month three, that’s yours to diagnose and fix.
- Menu quality. Menus, hero shots, item photos, tags, descriptions, and ratings are your product surface. You curate items that travel well and make sense as a single packed lunch, and eliminate recurring defects: missing photos, broken modifiers, misleading prices, items the kitchen doesn’t make.
- The team. You work with a Bogotá-based team across restaurant sales and onboarding, menu operations, and frontline support (POS, printers, tablets). You set the standards, SLAs, and routing, and improve the systems behind the work
Competencies
- Food-Obsessed Market Expert: Knows the region’s food scene: neighborhood staples, the brands eaters keep asking for, the spot that opened last month that nobody’s covering yet. Can name the five brands we should be chasing off the top of your head.
- Somehow-some-way mentality: Find a path to the signing even when the operator says no, the owner is unreachable, or the kitchen isn’t set up for batch orders. When a brand is a priority, you figure out how to get it on Picnic.
- Data-Literate Operator: Read a lateness report or a cuisine gap analysis and know exactly which restaurant to call. Convert supply and performance data into a clear, actionable plan.
- Builder and Team Leader: Close a partner in the morning and debug a menu modifier in the afternoon. Lead through others across time zones, and treat the same broken menu twice as a process failure, not bad luck.