Sous Chef & Operations Manager
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Key skills for this role
About the Role
Founding Sous Chef & Operations — RoomService Dubai, UAE On-site Full-time ABOUT ROOMSERVICE RoomService gives a household its own dedicated private chef — without the cost or hassle of hiring one.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Dubai, UAE
- On-site
- Full-time
About Roomservice
RoomService gives a household its own dedicated private chef — without the cost or hassle of hiring one.
Each customer is paired with a named chef who plans and cooks their meals fresh, to order, at mealtime — breakfast, lunch and dinner, personalised down to ingredients and macros — delivered hot.
It's not a meal-kit, a delivery app or a restaurant.
We make private-chef quality affordable by sharing one chef across a small cluster of nearby households and running the entire operation behind them: procurement, centralised prep (mise en place), packaging and delivery.
We've proven the experience in a pilot; now we're building the operation that scales it across Dubai.
This is a ground-floor role — you won't inherit a playbook, you'll help write it.
The Role
You're a chef who thinks like an operator.
Your core job is to make our kitchen operation excellent and scalable — designing the prep system, standardising recipes and controlling food cost so one chef can serve many households without quality ever slipping.
In these early months, you'll also roll up your sleeves and run procurement and delivery.
You speak the chefs' language and you can run a tight last-mile.
You turn a pilot into a repeatable, scalable operation — built from the kitchen out.
What You'Ll Own
- Kitchen & prep optimisation (your edge) — design and run our centralised mise en place so one chef can fire many personalised meals at once without quality loss. This is the heart of our model.
- Recipe standardisation & food cost — turn great dishes into documented, repeatable recipes with controlled portions and costs; protect quality and margin.
- Procurement & supplier management (yours to start) — source ingredients, packaging and consumables to each household's standards; negotiate terms; manage stock and par levels.
- Delivery & logistics (yours to start) — recruit, schedule and brief riders; plan routes and time windows; own hot, on-time delivery.
- Chef support & quality — coordinate menus, volumes and timings; lift standards; keep food safety and hygiene tight.
- Daily operations — run the daily rhythm end to end, be first responder when something breaks, and build the SOPs so it doesn't break twice.
- Procurement and delivery are yours to start — as we grow, you hand them to dedicated hires and rise into leading the whole culinary operation.
- We're upfront about that so the early grind is a choice you make with eyes open.
What Success Looks Like (First 6 Months)
1.
A working prep system that measurably increases how many menus one chef can produce — without quality loss.
2.
Food cost and recipes under control — standardised recipes, controlled portions, cost trending down per menu.
3.
A reliable hot, on-time, in-spec delivery rate, with a clear process when things slip.
4.
Procurement handled — a managed supplier list, negotiated terms, minimal waste.
5.
An operation someone could inherit — clear SOPs across kitchen, procurement and delivery.
What We'Re Looking For
- A trained chef who thinks like an operator — real kitchen experience (e.g. sous chef / chef de partie level); you know mise en place, food cost and kitchen flow, but you're as energised by running an operation as by cooking.
- A hustler with no ego about the early grind — you'd rather fix the 7am delivery yourself than wait for someone else. High energy, high ownership.
- Around 6-8 years in professional kitchens (cloud kitchens, catering, restaurants or hotels) — ideally in Dubai. We weigh what you've built and run over years on paper.
- Numerate and organised — comfortable with food cost, portions, stock and the numbers that matter.
- Ambitious and founding-minded — you want to build something from zero and grow into leading the whole culinary operation.
- Valid UAE driving licence and access to a car strongly preferred; food-safety / HACCP awareness a plus; Arabic alongside English a plus.
Nice To Have
- Cloud-kitchen, q-commerce or delivery-operations experience.
- Awareness of nutrition / macro-tracking (we cook to specific macros and calories).
- Existing supplier or rider relationships in Dubai.
- Experience setting up a kitchen or operation from scratch.
What We Offer
- Salary circa AED 15,000/month, plus founding equity to discuss.
- A clear path to grow into leading our whole culinary operation as we scale.
- A genuine ground-floor role with real ownership in an early-stage company.
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