Engineering Manager, Afresh
$186-215k
More information about location
SaaS for grocery store operations
Job no longer available
SaaS for grocery store operations
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
$186-215k
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
Outdated inventory systems remain a major issue for grocers, particularly when it comes to fresh food. Many still rely on manual processes or rigid software that struggles to account for constantly changing factors like demand, shelf life and supply fluctuations. The result is over-ordering, wasted food and unnecessary costs, all problems that become even harder to manage at scale.
Afresh is tackling this with an AI-powered platform built specifically for fresh food operations. Its system helps grocers forecast demand, manage inventory and make smarter ordering decisions across categories like produce, meat and bakery. What started as a replenishment tool has expanded into a broader operating system, supporting planning, buying and day-to-day decision-making across store teams.
The company has grown quickly too, now supporting more than 12,000 grocery departments across North American and partnering with major retailers like Albertsons, Meijer and Wakefern. Following a year of strong growth and new product launches, Afresh is expanding its reach across the food supply chain, with ambitions that go beyond the store level. As pressure mounts on grocers to reduce waste and improve margins, Afresh is ready to be a key player in bringing AI-driven decision-making to the entire fresh food ecosystem.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Aug 2022
$115m
SERIES B
Nov 2020
$13m
SERIES A
Total funding: $147.8m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive health plans
- Generous parental leave
- Equity packages
- 401k matching
- Flexible vacation policy
- Professional development program
- Work from home stipend
Company HQ
Yerba Buena, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Matt Schwartz
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Afresh in 2016, Matt worked as a Consultant for Bain & Company.
Nathan Fenner
(Co-Founder & CPO)Nathan has a Bachelors, Masters and MBA from Stanford University. Post studying, they became a Lecturer at Stanford in the Mechanical Engineering department before working at Liquid Robotics for 5 years.
Kristina Kemmer
(CTO)Kristina joined Afresh in 2023 as a Senior VP of Engineering, moving into the role of CTO in 2025. Prior to Afresh, she spent 4 years at Zapier as a Director/VP of Engineering and 2 years at InVision as an Engineering, then Senior Engineering Manager.
Adam Litle
(CRO)Prior to joining Afresh in 2025, Adam was the CEO of Sound Agriculture for over 5 years. He also served as the CRO at Granular for nearly 3 years and worked as a VP of Sales at Monetate for 1 year.
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