Tovala makes home-cooked meals effortless.We are a Chicago-based food-tech company that sells a smart, countertop steam oven that is paired with a weekly meal delivery service. We manufacture our hardware in south-east Asia and sell direct to consumer. Our food is produced in our own facility here in Chicago under the careful guidance of our Chefs. Meals are shipped to customers everywhere in the lower 48 states every week.

We pride ourselves on being a great place to work that makes hugely positive impact in our customers lives through the food they eat.

We’re Tovala, a food-tech company reinventing home cooking to save consumers time. Through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and fresh food delivery, we make it incredibly simple for anyone to prepare and enjoy delicious, home-cooked meals without sacrificing time to do whatever matters to them. Through our superior technology, product experience and food quality, we have separated Tovala from the busy pack of other meal delivery businesses. In the process, we’ve amassed a loyal, rapidly growing following and our retention, product engagement and customer NPS are all best-in-class. We’ve raised over $100mm from great investors like Left Lane Capital, Origin Ventures, Y Combinator and Comcast Ventures and have invested strongly in building a unique culture that fosters growth, personal development and camaraderie.

At Tovala, we eat data for breakfast…along with our delicious biscuits. Our team is a small group of engineers and analysts who are passionate about helping teams across the Tovala organization  make data-driven decisions. We are looking for an experienced Data Engineer who can help us to develop our existing data platform as well as bringing their own expertise and ideas to the table. An ideal candidate would be a data nerd with a strong technical background who enjoys working cross-functionally to solve problems with data. Bonus points if you love food as much as the rest of us!

How you’ll spend your time at Tovala

• Designing, building, maintaining, and improving our data pipelines to efficiently ingest, process and transform large volumes of data from multiple sources
• Developing robust data models to support analytics and reporting requirements, ensuring that the data is correct and up to date
• Maintaining and developing user-friendly development and production environments to ensure smooth deployment of new tooling
• Implementing rigorous testing and validation processes to ensure that our code and systems are running smoothly
• Deploying machine learning and AI models to enhance our understanding of the business and product
• Working closely with analysts, software engineers, and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical requirements
• Using your engineering know-how to turn business problems into precise technical solutions

About you

• Have 3+ years of experience working as a Data Engineer under your belt
• Proficient at using the skills below to turn business requirements into technical solutions 
• Comfortable working cross-functionally with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Excellent SQL skills (preferably SnowSQL)
• Excellent Python skills with an emphasis on efficiency and performance of ELT pipelines 
• Expertise at maintaining, tuning, and administering a database (preferably Snowflake) for multiple use cases
• Keenly understand the importance of good security and DevOps practices
• Comfortable in an AWS ecosystem (S3, Lambdas, EC2, IAM roles, Security Groups)
• Experience with dbt (Data Build Tool) - especially using macros
• Experience with Docker or similar containerization tools
• Experience deploying machine learning models is a plus
• Experience with using generative AI for text analytics is a plus

Compensation & Benefits

• Tovala uses market data, geography, and placement of internal employees to determine appropriate salary. Additionally, we offer all employees real ownership in the company in the form of a competitive equity package.
• Flexible paid time off (with a minimum of 15 days off you HAVE to take)
• Comprehensive healthcare coverage we really invest in 401k with match
• Free Tovala Smart Oven and discounted Tovala meals 
• Paid holidays and our winter holiday office shutdown where the offices and facilities close for a week around Christmas and New Years
• Various other perks - recognition programs, continued learning stipend, casual dress code, in-office coffee, snacks and drinks, and Tovala swag

The values we hold dear

Put the team first

We put what is best for the broader team ahead of what is best for ourselves or our immediate department.

Get s#!t done (well)

We celebrate people at all levels for delivering high impact work that expands the bounds of what we’re able to do.

Connect the dots

We engage with curiosity to learn how our work impacts others so that we can problem-solve holistically and work collaboratively.

Be Direct

We share our perspective openly and directly, even when it feels difficult to do so.

Embrace the obstacles

We rise to meet challenges with a sense of urgency, resolve, and optimism.

Champion the customer

We consider and prioritize our customer in all of our decisions 

At Tovala we‘re committed to building a workplace that represents a variety of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Everyone is welcome here!

Our servers are built on AWS using golang APIs and a PostgreSQL database. We maintain native iOS and Android apps, and on the web, we use React.js for our internal tools and checkout with Webflow for our marketing site CMS. Our ovens are built on the Electric Imp IoT platform.

While we have fun playing with technology, we love that all our software goes to work helping people cook effortlessly. Most software companies are all about the Agile, ours is all about delicious food.