Careers

Food is one of the pillars of our business- and our company has grown to the point where its time to expand our food team. As Tovala’s new R&D Chef, you will be charged with creating and developing new recipes for the Tovala meal service. Unlike traditional food industry roles, we’re also a technology company, meaning that you will work with customer support to field customer inquiries, with our diverse engineering team as they work on product improvements and with our design team on photo shoots. You’ll work on developing recipes for scale—and finding cost and production efficiencies as you do so. You’ll work directly with, and learn from, our Chief Culinary Officer, Alexander Plotkin.

About You

• 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
• Strong kitchen skills
• Strong conflict resolution skills
• Culinary arts degree with 3+ years related food service, manufacturing and/or volume cooking experience
• Food science degree is a plus but not required
• You are optimistic, resourceful, and ready to take on any challenges
• Have the ability to work in a fast-paced start-up environment—skilled at planning, organizing, prioritizing, and executing simultaneous projects and activities
• You’re hard working and disciplined
• You are a self starter
• Culinary vision and passion for food, with an understanding of industry trends, current and future
• You live in Chicago (or are willing to move)!

About the Role

• Meal/Recipe Development
• Capture each formulation within database with complete accuracy and clear consistent procedures
• Test existing recipes
• Research and execute product improvements and cost optimization for existing meals
• Conduct proper shelf life studies for any food developed and for food already developed
• Collaborate with marketing team to develop food related content
• Prepare meals for photoshoots
• Assist with planning and food preparation for marketing events
• Provide technical response to culinary inquiries from customers and business development team
• Support production team as needed
• Ability to coordinate and collaborate with multi-functional teams during all stages of development

In this new role, as Tovala’s Human Resources Generalist you will primarily focus on employee relations and recruiting at our food production facility.  This role reports to the COO, and will work out of our Chicago production facility.  Our team is currently comprised of 40 associates; 5% exempt and 95% non-exempt/hourly paid.  Our workforce is 90% full-time and 10% part-time.  We operate 6am-6pm on M-Sat and 6am-2pm on Sunday.  Ideally, this role works a 4-hour day, M-F, on-site at our Chicago location.  

We are a start-up backed by investments from Origin Ventures, The Pritzker Group, and Y Combinator and are in the process of scaling.  We’ve been growing our business and need an HR leader to join us as we scale.  Our team is primarily comprised of a workforce based in our manufacturing facility, and also includes corporate staff located at our HQ in the West Loop.  This role will be based in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago with light travel to the West Loop.

About You

Because you are a one-person HR team, we need someone with a wide breadth of HR generalist experience who can get us up to speed on any policies and processes as well as support the team as we build our team and evolve our culture.  This job is not a desk job, but interacts with the entire facility to constantly be in conversation with the team and be a pro-active change agent as we scale our business.

About the Role

• Manage staff recruiting and new associate orientation
• Provide day-today employee relations and performance counseling to managers and associates
• Develop and ensure fair and consistent administration of all human resources policies and practices
• Administration and implementation of communications programs to increase clarity, employee engagement and morale
• Administer payroll processing, time and attendance recording and processing company compensation and benefits programs
• Accountable for maintaining compliance with federal and state regulations concerning employment, pay, etc. including OSHA

Ideal candidate

• Bachelor degree in Human Resource related field
• Minimum of 4 years of relevant experience
• PHR/SPHR certification
• Experience in manufacturing, recruiting and payroll required
• Knowledge of Federal/State laws as they pertain to human resource administration and ability to update and coach the team’s knowledge and provide related guidance
• Strong conflict resolution skills
• Strong oral, written and communication skills; bilingual (Spanish) preferred
• Proven organizational, planning and follow up skills

As the Acquisition Manager, Paid Media at Tovala, you’ll own our carefully measured customer acquisition efforts by driving growth through superior performance of our paid media channels including Facebook, Instagram, Google Adwords, Criteo, programmatic, and others. You’ll also successfully identify and leverage new paid channels. You’ll be in charge of scaling our paid acquisition efforts (measured by improving CAC and growth). This is an opportunity to truly own and scale paid customer acquisition at a quickly growing, innovative consumer brand.

About You

• You have at least a bachelor's degree.
• You’re a proven digital marketer with deep expertise across acquisition-marketing channels (especially Facebook), and can provide direction and ownership for Tovala’s performance marketing and acquisition strategies.
• You’ve previously scaled a B2C e-commerce brand via paid customer acquisition, and you can’t wait to do it again!
• You’re analytical with a proven track record of scoping and executing on analytics projects and a bias for A/B testing and experimentation.
• You’re results driven and bring a rigorous, metrics-driven approach to marketing and paid advertising campaigns.
• You’re comfortable evaluating an entire growth funnel using standard marketing KPIs (CTR, CPA, Site Bounce Rate, etc).
• You’re well versed in analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and FullStory.
• You embrace both the science and art of effective customer acquisition.
• You’re comfortable translating brand positioning and messaging strategy into paid advertising campaigns, and can help us inform our messaging tests and strategy.
• You’re a customer-centric marketer who can think holistically about the customer journey and figure out how to use paid media channels to find the right consumers and build the Tovala brand.
• You have a strong ability to rapidly learn new skills and a deep interest in learning about a variety of topics related to startup growth, including SEO, SEM, landing page conversion optimization, viral loops, data science, etc.
• You bring a creative and open mind to the team and are ready to hit the ground running!
  

About the Role

• You’ll manage and allocate Tovala’s paid media budget.
• You’ll partner with our high-energy team of marketers, engineers, designers, and copywriters, to determine strategic opportunities, share best practices, and deliver on key cross-functional initiatives
• You’ll lead the process of identifying, testing, analyzing and scaling new, paid acquisition channels with a fast moving, data driven approach.
• You’ll be responsible for day-to-day operations like account optimization and maintenance, reviewing, editing and loading ad assets, running tests, writing ad copy, and consulting for overall strategy discussions.
• You’ll foster storytelling to create a dynamic, engaging and authentic brand experience that successfully reflects the spirit of our mission throughout our paid advertising campaigns.
• You’ll develop and maintain daily, weekly, monthly, and ad hoc reporting on performance by channel, ensuring the efficiency and success of marketing efforts and spend.
• You’ll create your own data-driven hypotheses and strategies for new growth areas.
• You’ll stay on top of new techniques, strategies, tools and changes to test for better results & campaign successes. You’re someone who devours content.
• You’ll document and communicate the success (or failure!) of campaigns, and offer suggestions for ways to improve.
  

As the data lead at Tovala, you’ll own the development and direction of data decision making at Tovala.  This means applying your expertise in almost every part of the company.  It could mean building models to predict food orders, designing data visualizations for the culinary team, or conducting marketing attribution analysis.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree required. Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, Quantitative Finance or other analytics- related field or equivalent practical experience preferred.
• Minimum of 4 years of experience, preferably in e-commerce or consumer company.
• Experience with the data and modeling of customer acquisition in order to drive growth
• You’re an extremely quick, strategic thinker with exceptional experience leading highly analytical teams.
• You have industry experience in SQL, as well as one or more statistical tools (R, SAS, SPSS, Python).
• You have strong organizational skills and flexibility. The ability to adapt to change quickly and to tackle unfamiliar tasks and requests with positive attitude and resourcefulness.
• 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.
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.

About the Role

• This position will help Tovala evaluate operational performance, research industry trends, proactively identify and solve opportunities for value-added analysis, develop points of view to drive results, and frame recommendations for leadership.
• You’ll lead analytic efforts to assess marketing initiatives and develop better understanding of customer acquisition effectiveness.
• You’ll maintain consistent reporting cadences across a group of stakeholders and use our data to succinctly communicate performance, areas for improvement, and shared success.
• You’ll set the direction and iterate on the data needs across a variety of business functions.
• You’ll design operational data science models that are used to improve or predict business outcomes and enhance the customer experience.
• You’ll lead the data science team by nurturing, recruiting, and training future employees as the needs of Tovala grow and change.

As a Tovala Social Media Intern, you will work with our marketing team to help build and execute organic social media strategies that drive customer acquisition and respond in near real-time to customer and prospect questions and comments.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree in process or completed.
  
• You're interested in startups and excited to work in a fast-paced environment.
• You’re a social media fanatic and understand best practices for each network.
  
• You’re able to balance a range of tasks at once.
  
• You are creative and strive to find new ways to grow an audience and loyal followers.
  
• You are strategic and can plan an entire content campaign from conceptualization to execution.
  
• You understand what it means to be a brand on social media and can create copy that speaks for the brand & engages our audience in our brand voice.
  
• You love producing and editing relevant visual deliverables such as video & stills.
  
• You have strong organizational skills and flexibility. The ability to adapt to change quickly and to tackle unfamiliar tasks and requests with positive attitude and resourcefulness.
  
• 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.
  
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.
  

About the Role

• Manage day-to-day operations of current organic social channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) including responding to comments and questions in near real-time in the Tovala brand voice.
• Partner with creative teams to develop and produce new content campaigns for multiple channels.
• Acquire new customers via Tovala’s organic social channels.
• Engage community of followers through planned campaigns and respond through in-the-moment comments and messages.
• Manage data tracking and analytics systems to gauge success and create plans.
• Develop and manage monthly and quarterly strategic plans and goals.

Tovala is looking for a full-time production supervisor in order to supervise food packaging shifts, and assist with implementing QA, Food Safety and Employee Safety programs, as well as additional production shifts as we expand our operation.

As a production supervisor, you will oversee all operations in our kitchen and warehouse facilities during your respective shift. You would be responsible for ensuring food quality and safety as well as efficient utilization of our staff, equipment, and other resources to streamline our food production processes. You will also monitor performance standards for all aspects of our food production.

About You

• Three to five years of experience in manufacturing / production, experience in food production strongly preferred
• Two years of supervisory experience
• Experience creating and implementing food safety and/or employee safety programs, and general production documentation a plus. Experience with HACCP also a plus.
• Fluent in English, strong Spanish language skills a plus
• Comfortable with Microsoft Word and Excel; willing to learn new online tools and communication channels
• A self-starter with effective leadership, interpersonal, and verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to excel in a fast-paced work environment with a growing start-up company
• Ability to work evenings and/or weekends

As a Tovala Customer Success Teammate, you will work with the Support Team to help our customers have a seamless and enjoyable experience with our company — from ordering a Tovala Smart Oven to cooking a delicious Tovala Meal in their home. You’ll be the first line to greet incoming chats, calls and emails and ensure that any questions or concerns from our customers are addressed in a timely, appropriate and fun manner. You will aim to provide support that is above and beyond and work to add an element of surprise and delight to all customer interactions. You will also be providing vital insights to the rest of the team to help improve our products and services.

As a Tovala Showroom Sales Specialist, you will work at our first-ever Pop-Up Shop in Lincoln Park (Chicago) to engage with prospective customers, answer their questions, host product demonstrations, and leave them feeling positive about our company, product and brand.

About You

• You're energetic and results driven
  
• You are a great communicator
  
• You have prior sales experience (ideally in customer-focused environments)
• You're comfortable thinking on your feet
• 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
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life
• You're comfortable with email
• You are available to work on nights and weekends
  

About the role

We unveiled our first Tovala Showroom this July in Lincoln Park. The showroom will be open through January or 2019. If it is successful, we will launch showrooms across the country, so this role is hugely important to our organization. You will be the front line for our company and will be tasked with educating, connecting with and selling potential consumers on the value of Tovala. You'll learn our products and value proposition inside out – and be able to communicate it clearly and enthusiastically.

Responsibilities:

• Achieve and exceed individual sales goals
  
• Learn the Tovala product suite (oven, mobile app and meals) inside out and develop a deep understanding of Tovala’s brand
• Accurately record customer information into our CRM tool
• Accurately report on key business metrics at the end of your shift
  
• Accurately share key learnings from the day at the end of your shift
  
• Foster a hard-working, friendly team-oriented work environment
  
• Maintain visual/physical standards of store
  
• Follow all processes & procedures rigorously
  

About You

• You have outstanding engineering talent, shown by great results, cool side projects, or open source contributions.
• You have a background in API design / consumption.
• You have experience working with designers and bridging the gap between graphic design and technical implementation.
• You have strong opinions on mobile app design and philosophy.
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.
• You’ve written in Kotlin or are curious about doing so.

About the role

We have two mobile developers at Tovala - both are based in the Bay Area. Your role will be to support them and take on major responsibilities for new feature development and bug fixing on the Tovala Android app. The internship can be in the Bay Area or Chicago (Tovala HQ).

You will be responsible for managing the Quality Assurance function by working with our Production Manager to ensure highly disciplined compliance with all product quality parameters and standards. You will ensure highly disciplined compliance with all regulatory and company defined food safety and sanitation standards, systems, procedures and practices in order to guarantee absolute quality and consistency of product. You will be responsible for monitoring FDA/HACCP/FSMA plans and SSOP’s as the process and/or regulations change and initiate improvements and upgrades at co-pack partners.

About You

• Three to five years of experience in food production
• Two years of supervisory experience
• Experienced with and capable of demonstrating strong understanding of HACCP or related food safety protocol
• Strong working knowledge of food safety, food regulations and basic food technology
• Fluent in English, strong Spanish language skills a plus
• Comfortable with Microsoft Word and Excel; willing to learn new online tools and communication channels
• A self-starter with effective leadership, interpersonal, and verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to excel in a fast-paced work environment with a growing start-up company
• Ability to work off-shifts (evening, weekend) as needed

About the role

We've developed healthy and delicious meals that are being shipped to customers across the country. We have already doubled our volume of food production since opening to public sales. As one of our frontline staff members on food production, you will help us grow our business even further.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Oversee all food safety procedures and operations for Tovala in our food production facilityDevelop and implement SOP’s, FDA/HACCP/FSMA, GMP’s, pest control, allergen control, QA documentation, and other food safety and quality elements required. Responsible for evaluation and resolution of vendor/ customer product quality issues
• Assist with managing and directing food production staff in collaboration with Production Manager and team, including hiring, training, and monitoring performance standards
• Monitor performance of kitchen equipment and machinery in collaboration with food production and engineering teams; communicates equipment malfunction to engineering team
• Support procurement and shipping operations in collaboration with operations and culinary teams
• Develop and maintain performance standards for all aspects of food production

For our data analytics intern role at Tovala, you’ll own the development of all dashboards, analytics systems, attribution, and automated rules needed to ensure the health and growth of the company’s customer funnel over time.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree required. Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, Quantitative Finance or other analytics- related field or equivalent practical experience preferred.
• Minimum of 2 years of experience, preferably in e-commerce or consumer company. - You’re an extremely quick, strategic thinker with exceptional experience leading highly analytical teams.
• You have industry experience in SQL, as well as one or more statistical tools (R, SAS, SPSS, Python).
• You have strong organizational skills and flexibility. The ability to adapt to change quickly and to tackle unfamiliar tasks and requests with positive attitude and resourcefulness.
• You have a strong background in marketing analytics with the understanding of campaign testing, refinement, and optimization of digital campaigns to deliver exceptional results.
• 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.
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.

About the role

• You’ll work closely with our lead data engineer and be involved in analytic efforts to assess marketing initiatives and develop better understanding of marketing effectiveness.
• This position will help Tovala evaluate marketing campaign performance, research industry trends, proactively identify and solve opportunities for value-added analysis, develop points of view to drive results, and frame recommendations for leadership.
• You’ll work with marketing and funnel data, performing QA when needed, and diving into the database when needed to solve problems.
• You’ll help with reporting across a group of marketing stakeholders and use our data to succinctly communicate performance, areas for improvement, and shared success.
• You’ll develop self-service web based tools, in concert with our engineering and data science teams, to deliver high level views of performance to internal stakeholders.
• Develop and maintain performance standards for all aspects of food production

As a Director of Strategy and Operations 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 devising strategies and executing on making our process more efficient, higher quality and cheaper. You will focus on our food operation (everything from procuring the food to packaging to shipping), and support our oven operation, particularly as it relates to getting ovens to our customers.

About You

• 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 understand and believe in the importance of delicious, healthy food.You have an MBA.
• Management consulting and/or operations experience is preferred.
• You live in Chicago or are willing to move.

About the role

We have built a product that is truly changing the way people eat at home. It’s convenient, it’s delicious and it’s healthy. We’ve only just started optimizing our operation, but intend to grow our strategy/ops team and leverage our engineering talent to build a world-class, state of the art food operation.

You would report directly to our COO and work with her 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.

As a data analytics manager at Tovala, you’ll own the development of all dashboards, analytics systems, attribution, and automated rules needed to ensure the health and growth of the company’s customer funnel over time.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree required. Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, Quantitative Finance or other analytics- related field or equivalent practical experience preferred.
• Minimum of 2 years of experience, preferably in e-commerce or consumer company.
• You’re an extremely quick, strategic thinker with exceptional experience leading highly analytical teams.
• You have industry experience in SQL, as well as one or more statistical tools (R, SAS, SPSS, Python).
• You have strong organizational skills and flexibility. The ability to adapt to change quickly and to tackle unfamiliar tasks and requests with positive attitude and resourcefulness.
• You have a strong background in marketing analytics with the understanding of campaign testing, refinement, and optimization of digital campaigns to deliver exceptional results.
• 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.
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.

About the role

• You’ll lead analytic efforts to assess marketing initiatives and develop better understanding of marketing effectiveness.
• This position will help Tovala evaluate marketing campaign performance, research industry trends, proactively identify and solve opportunities for value-added analysis, develop points of view to drive results, and frame recommendations for leadership.
• You’ll take ownership of marketing and funnel data, performing QA when needed, implementing policies and procedures to produce better data, and diving into the database when needed to solve problems.
• You’ll maintain consistent reporting cadences across a group of marketing stakeholders and use our data to succinctly communicate performance, areas for improvement, and shared success.
• You’ll develop self-service web based tools, in concert with our engineering and data science teams, to deliver high level views of performance to internal stakeholders.
• Develop and maintain performance standards for all aspects of food production

As a product manager at Tovala, you’ll be responsible for defining, designing and managing implementation of consumer facing e-commerce solutions. You’ll be charged with delivering a unique and world class shopping experience to our Tovala website and app customers.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree required; MBA preferred.
• Minimum of 3 years of experience, preferably in e-commerce or consumer company.
• You’re experienced Product Manager with a strong ecommerce background who can work closely with the Product and Engineering teams as well as senior leadership to help define and drive the product strategy at Tovala.
• You have experience working with highly cross-functional teams and can manage complex projects with multiple stakeholders and priorities.
• 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.
• Food has played (or continues to play) an important role in your life.

About the role

• You’ll lead product strategy, develop product roadmaps, prioritize user stories, and drive product development from conceptualization, design and development, to launch and ongoing support in a fast-paced, agile environment.
• As the leader of the web and app product roadmap, you’ll ruthlessly prioritize key initiatives from inception to delivery while working with the executive team, key stakeholders, engineers, product design, and other cross-functional teams.
• You’ll learn the business inside and out, gathering high level requirements to ensure successful outcome for releases from small to large.
• Develop and maintain performance standards for all aspects of food production

As the lead IoT engineer at Tovala, you will work across the software and hardware teams to manage the connected features of our ovens. New initiatives include adding metrics to cook cycles to improve efficiency and reliability, better user notifications and interaction, and a new system to manage the fleet of connected ovens from one location. You'll be building tools to make our customers' experience better, to provide customer service with the data they need to help diagnose issue, and for the engineering team to improve the product.

Our ovens are based on the ElectricImp IoT platform.

About You

• You've worked with IoT electronics at the hobby level or higher
• You know how to read MCU datasheets to find that one register you need to set
• You've worked with digital on-board protocols like SPI and i2c
• You can write software that runs on servers to help manage IoT devices
• You have some familiarity with structuring a RESTful API
• 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 understand and believe in the importance of delicious, healthy food