What are the responsibilities and job description for the Engineering Manager, Merchandising position at Afresh?
Afresh is on a mission to eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all. Our first A.I.-powered solution optimizes ordering, forecasting, and store operations for fresh food departments in brick-and-mortar grocers. With our Fresh Operating System, regional and national grocery retailers have placed $1.6 billion in produce orders across the US and we've helped our partners prevent 34 million pounds of food from going to waste. Working at Afresh represents a one-of-a-kind opportunity to have massive social impact at scale by leveraging uncommonly impactful software – we hope you'll join us!
About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the Merchandising team at Afresh. This team plays a critical role in developing insights, products, and systems that empower our corporate users to optimize operations, product placement, assortment, and promotions to help grocers meet customer needs while minimizing waste.
As a leader of this team, you’ll work closely with partners across product, design, and data science to shape our insights and merchandising solutions. You’ll also have the opportunity to scale a high-performing engineering team, guiding them through complex technical challenges while fostering a collaborative and inclusive culture.
What You’ll Own
- Manage and mentor a team of cross-functional engineers, fostering growth, collaboration, and engineering best practices.
- Define and communicate the team’s goals and roadmap, by balancing meeting short-term customer needs with long-term strategic product and engineering goals.
- Partner with product managers, data scientists, and other Afresh stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions to the Afresh corporate customers.
- Guide system architecture and technical design, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
- Evaluate and manage third-party tools and platforms that support initiatives within the Merchandising team.
- Create operational maturity in the team using metrics and data to support design-making and measure success.
- Be a culture carrier for Afresh. Set the tone for your team as a proactive, positive, and candid leader who thrives in solving hard challenges and motivates their team to do the same.
What You’ll Help With
- Work closely with other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of insights and other merchandising tools into Afresh’s broader platform.
- Identify opportunities to improve development processes, tooling, and team efficiency across engineering.
- Continuously improve our service quality, and support the team with on-call and incident resolution.
- Explore and implement advanced technologies and methodologies to improve Afresh capabilities.
What You’ll Learn
- Deep insights into the grocery retail industry and the unique challenges of fresh food merchandising and the fresh food supply chain.
- The intricacies of AI-driven decision-making tools and how they can transform grocer operations.
- Strategies for balancing the needs of diverse stakeholders while delivering impactful, user-focused solutions.
Within One Month, You Will…
- Build relationships with your team, key stakeholders, and the broader engineering organization.
- Understand the current Merchandising roadmap, priorities, and ongoing projects.
- Familiarize yourself with Afresh’s engineering culture, systems, and workflows.
Within Three Months, You Will…
- Lead the delivery of a key project.
- Partner with other product and engineering leaders to shape the team’s long-term vision.
- Establish trust with your direct reports, understanding and supporting their career and personal development.
Within Twelve Months, You Will…
- Lead the execution of major initiatives that align with Afresh’s business objectives.
- Strengthen the Merchandising team’s technical and operational excellence.
- Contribute to the overall success of Afresh’s engineering organization.
About You
- You have management experience leading full-stack engineering teams across back-end, data, and front-end domains with prior engineering and leadership experience with scalable backend and data systems. Experience building analytics products and systems is not required but preferred.
- You have experience collaborating with Product, Design, and customer-facing functions with a keen focus on customer and business outcomes.
- You have executed with a team in a fast-moving environment.
- You have experience hiring, growing, and developing teams, and you thrive on helping your team reach their full potential and foster a culture of collaboration and inclusion.
- You balance technical expertise with a strong understanding of business goals.
- You excel at managing complex projects and ensuring alignment across teams, functions, and disparate stakeholders.
- You’re eager to learn and continuously improve yourself, your team, and the organization you are a part of.
Salary Band in USD:
Salary Band in CAD:
About Afresh
Founded in 2017, Afresh is working on the #1 solution to curb climate change: reducing food waste. By combining human insight and transformative technology, we're helping grocers provide fresher food to customers at more affordable prices.
Afresh sits at an incredible intersection of positive social impact, rocket ship financial growth, and cutting-edge technology. Our best-in-class AI research has been published in top journals including ICML, and we've raised over $148 million in funding from investors including former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market Walter Robb and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.
Fresh is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values of proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility.
Afresh provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.
Here at Afresh, many of our employees work remotely provided that they reside in one of the following states: AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MT, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, TX, WA, WI. However, there may be key roles that will require a candidate/employee to be local to our San Francisco, CA office. In which case this requirement will be included in the job posting details under "Skills and experience" for reference.
