Restaurant Operations Manager

Picnic; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 93,000 - 109,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k)

Health Savings Account

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Picnic is seeking a Territory Restaurant Manager in the Chicago area to own the restaurant supply base, sign partners, and ensure on-time prep and proper packaging for a diverse range of lunch options. You will manage performance, curate menus, and drive quality across multiple markets.

You’ll collaborate with a Bogotá-based team across restaurant sales, onboarding, and operations, setting standards and processes to scale.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Working knowledge of restaurant operations: kitchen workflow, POS systems, menu management, ticket flow.
• Spanish is a plus given the Bogotá-based team.

Responsibilities

• Own restaurant supply for the XYZ region, sign partners, ensure capacity and on-time prep.
• Manage onboarding, launch, and ongoing health of restaurant partners; diagnose and fix delays.
• Curate menus, hero shots, descriptions, and ensure items travel well as packed lunches.
• Lead cross-time-zone team across restaurant sales, onboarding, and frontline support; set SLAs and routing.

Skills

Team leadership

Negotiation

Data literacy

Operational mindset

Food industry knowledge

Tools

Toast POS

Square POS

Clover POS

Google Sheets

Job 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.

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 Territory Restaurant Manager, you’ll own restaurant supply for the XYZ 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.
• Assertive Negotiator: Understand Picnic’s commission structure and restaurant economics. Hold the commission line and still leave the operator feeling like a partner.

What We’re Looking For

• 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

Who You Are

• 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

Why join us

• Drive real impact: Be part of building the operational engine behind a fast-growing startup that’s redefining how work gets done.
• Own your city: Take full ownership of your city’s performance and see the direct results of your ideas and execution every single day.
• Work with purpose: Join a mission-driven team focused on making the workplace experience better for thousands of people.
• Grow with us: At Picnic, there’s room to grow—personally and professionally—as we scale and take on new challenges together.

What Else You Need To Know

This role is based in our Chicago office location. As a company driven by innovation and continuous change, close collaboration is essential. We’re constantly reimagining our industry, creating new products, and refining our processes, and we do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The base salary range for this role is $93,000 - $109,000 per year.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards and an annual performance-based bonus.

Benefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees)

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance (multiple plans, incl. HSA options).
• Company-paid life and disability insurance (short- and long-term).
• Voluntary insurance: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity.
• Optional supplemental life insurance for self, spouse, and children.
• Pet insurance discount.
• 401(k).
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare, Dependent Care, Commuter)
• Time Off policies:
• Discretionary vacation days
• 8 paid holidays per year
• Paid sick time
• Paid Bereavement leave
• Paid Parental Leave

Benefits Are Subject To Change At The Company's Discretion.

Atoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.