Sous Chef

Annapoorna; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 600,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

Job summary

Annapoorna is building a foundational kitchen operation in Gurugram, crafting fresh, high-volume Indian meals with disciplined SOPs and scalable processes. You will lead from the pass, supervise a growing team, and help shape the kitchen playbook with the founder to enable rapid expansion.

You will be part of an early founding team, driving daily execution, batch control, and quality assurance across kitchen operations, ensuring consistency and growth as the company scales.

Qualifications

• Must have Indian cuisine expertise and mass-production experience.
• Graduate of a reputable hotel MTP with 1–7 years as Sous Chef.
• Comfortable with strict SOP-driven environments.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end production against standardized recipes and processes.
• Run high-volume daily meal production with batch planning and timing.
• Enforce food safety, hygiene, and quality gates.
• Lead kitchen staff, train, and maintain discipline.
• Develop and refine Kitchen SOPs and playbooks with the founder.

Skills

Hands-on leadership

On-ground execution

Calm under pressure

Indian cuisine expertise

Mass production / batch cooking

Education

Management Training Program (MTP) from a reputed 5-star hotel brand

Job description

An urban Indian eats about 90 meals a month. About 80 of them are everyday meals: dal, sabzi, and roti. Food delivery apps serve almost none of these. Most homes still depend on a part-time cook who has about an hour per home, so food gets cooked whenever the cook has a slot and is eaten cold or microwaved.

We make three promises to the people who eat with us:

• Food made fresh in small batches and served hot, the way your mother would serve it at home.
• A kitchen you can trust as much as your own.
• The nutrition you need, from your daily meals.

We deliver this through Live Kitchens. Each one is 3,000 to 4,000 sq ft and serves the homes and offices within about 2 km, so food reaches people hot within 10 minutes. Our own software, the Kitchen OS, runs the kitchen: what to cook, how much, and when.

We are well capitalized to build this - we have raised $3.7 million in our angel+seed round from top VCs and founders in India, including founders of Blinkit, Cred, Tata 1mg, Chaayos, TBO.com, CoinSwitch, PocketFM, the ex-CTO of Zomato and Blinkit, and more.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• SOP Execution at Scale: Own end-to-end production against standardized recipes and processes.
• Mass Production Excellence: Run high-volume daily meal production with precision — batch planning, mise en place discipline, timing, and throughput.
• Quality & Process Discipline: Enforce food safety, hygiene, and consistency standards. Build and maintain checklists, audits, and quality gates.
• Team Supervision: Lead kitchen staff with clarity and calm. Set expectations, train relentlessly, and hold the line on discipline.
• Build the Kitchen Playbook: Work closely with the founder to define and refine SOPs, workflows, and operating rhythms for kitchen operations as the company scales.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• You’ll be one of the earliest members of the founding team. It’s a chance to build the kitchen that feeds a new category of food-tech.
• You’ll have direct access to the founder, real ownership of outcomes, and the opportunity to shape how an entire operation runs from day one.
• When we succeed, this role will be career-defining.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Hands-on and comfortable being on the ground, driving execution end-to-end
• Graduate of a Management Training Program (MTP) from a reputed 5-star hotel brand with 1-7 years of experience as a Junior Sous Chef / Sous Chef.
• Expertise in Indian Cuisine is a MUST. Experience in mass production, banquet, or bulk cooking operations is preferred i.e. you’ve cooked at scale and understand batch control.
• Deeply disciplined and detail-oriented. You find comfort in systems, checklists, and repeatable processes.
• Calm under pressure. Structured and firm in execution — not reactive or ad hoc.
• Comfortable operating within strict SOP-driven environments.
• Hands-on. You lead from the pass, not from a desk.

WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT

This is a foundational role in building our kitchen operations from 0 to 1. You will translate our culinary vision into consistent, scalable execution while establishing the processes, standards, and systems that will define our kitchens as we grow. What you build here will become the operating playbook for the future.

PAY AND EQUITY

We pay competitive salaries along with meaningful equity, so everyone who helps build Annapoorna shares in what it becomes. You grow with the company, and your stake grows with your impact. This role is for a chef who wants to grow into the head of kitchen operations as we open more kitchens.

OUR BELIEFS

• Nourishment is the point; taste is how it wins. We engineer wellbeing people crave, every single day.
• Great craft should multiply. We encode expertise into systems, so our best day in the kitchen becomes every customer’s every day.
• Consistency is a joy, not a chore. The 10,000th meal should taste like the first.
• Every role is a mandate. You own outcomes, co-create the how, and shape important decisions from week one.
• Low ego, high conviction. We argue hard, decide boldly, and put the mission above ourselves.
• The first people here shape the culture. We are deliberately building a company with a soul, and you’ll be part of how it’s formed.