Why is Rebel Foods Hiring Super-talented Engineers?
In the 10 years of our journey, the question that I have been asked the most number of times is “are you a tech company or a food company?” My answer has always remained the same “we are as much a tech company as we are a food company”. But, over time, as we are scaling across India and now increasingly on a global stage, I think we are morphing into a “Technology company solving the biggest problems across food missions for the customer”. Let me explain.
If you love the exercise of starting from the customer and working backwards to solve his/her biggest problems, then you will simply love the business of “Food”, not only because “Food” touches our lives more closely and in more ways than anything else, probably has the biggest TAM out there, but also because a zillion things in “Food” are still unsolved. Unlike, say, retail or commute, or entertainment. A few examples of stupendously interesting problems that remain largely unsolved (at least at scale) are:
a. How can I be sure what I am eating? What hands have touched my food? what are the ingredients?
b. I don’t know of any restaurant that customises the food based on what I like or dislike, what I am allergic to, what my specific dietary requirements are
c. I want to cook a delicious pasta now, but I don’t know how to cook it and half of the ingredients listed on a recipe site are not available right now at my home and I have to go out to buy them and / or order from an online store which delivers in 24 hours
d. Everything from phone to my TV has become 10X smarter, but my kitchen is still super dumb and I have not seen a dumber machine than the microwave. The only buttons I use among the gazillion buttons on it is start.
And there could be 100 more such problems for the customer that no one is solving.
Now consider some possible answers to above questions:
a. Eating Sure: Every dish comes with a label (and/or a whatsapp message), scanning / reading which you get to know everything about that dish (be it served at the restaurant or delivered to your home) from precise descriptions of the ingredients and where they came from (blockchain), who prepared your dish (you can also have a live chat with the chef), whether everyone who touched your food is medically fit to do it, which kitchen (with a video stream) it has come from, how the packaging was sanitised in a UV machine etc etc.
b. Personalised: You can pass on all your customisation information at the click of a button, and the restaurant’s automated ingredient dispensers (which is connected with your order through IOT) remove the things that you don’t want and may be, add the things that you specifically want to your dish; the heating / frying / tossing devices adjust themselves in terms of temperature and movement to cook the dish just the way you want — medium done?; next time the restaurant remembers your preferences and over time, builds more understanding about you ( and may be, just asks you “the usual?”) so that you can have your favourite dish, just the way you want. And the restaurant is able to do all that without creating a mayhem from confusion overload at the kitchen ( this is why they don’t do it now).
c. Integrated cooking solution: An app that recommends what you can cook today (or this week) based on what ingredients you have at home, and handholds you through making the dish, while training you how to cook all the while. If you want to cook a new dish, say a risotto or a nasi goreng or a biryani, it tells you what you don’t have at home and lets you order it and get it delivered in 30 minutes. And then again handholds you through the process of cooking it. And over time understands what you like and what you don’t like, manages your calorie intake by suggesting specific ingredients and adjusting the level and type of oil and sauces in your cooking.
d. Smart Kitchen Device: Imagine a device (say an automated Wok or Bowl) that’s integrated with the above app and lets you cook things in a perfect way by adjusting time, temperature, tossing movement etc etc as per the dish you are cooking. And washes itself after the cooking.
The thing is, all of the above are live projects at Rebel, some at pilot stage and some at scale stage and many somewhere in between. Many of the components are already deployed at Rebel Kitchens across India and the world— like automated dispensing, automated tossing of an wok, temp / time adjusted fryers, visual AI based quality checks of dishes, integration of devices with orders so that customisations can be seamless etc etc. Last year we applied for a number of patents and more are coming up this year.
For a long time, Food-tech meant “Food Delivery Tech”. I believe significant work has happened there and is still happening. But, we always were and are focused on core “food-tech”, which is using technology to solve core problems around Food — for customers and as a business. One way to think about this is if Swiggy, Zomato, DoorDash, Delivery Hero, Gojek are doing for food what Uber has done for transport; then we are trying to do for Food what Tesla and Autonomous Vehicle Manufacturers are doing for transport.
Some of the technology we deployed in large parts of our 320+ cloud kitchens, 3500+ virtual restaurants, in 40 cities across India, Indonesia, UAE and UK are:
- Visual AI QC machines that can detect SWAT (size, weight, appearance and temperature) for each prepared dish and reject / accept based on extent of deviation from ideal (think the luggage scanner at airports that can send a bag to a “to be checked” line)
- A robotics-led smart fryer that gets adjusted automatically for the oil temp, dipping and releasing based on what you are frying. So, it recognises when you are frying a Samosa vs a Falafel and does the job accordingly without anyone having to remember what temp, how much time etc etc. This lets us launch 1000s of to-be-fried products across brands without having to train 5000 people every time we launch a new fried dish
- 100+ of our kitchens now have an automated Wok that dispenses oil, water and other ingredients — as per the measure for the dish we are cooking, from hakka noodles to chilly chicken, prompts you to add specific ingredients at specific point (may be an “extra onion” request from a customer), automatically tosses the ingredients up and down and at the correct and measured speed, and finishes a dish just like a chef would, with 100% freshness, consistency and quality every single time. And recipes can be fed over the internet to this machine by our Culinary Innovation Team led by a team of chefs with 15 + years of experience, so that every time we are launching a new product, we have totally consistent and great quality from day one.
- A QR code solution to all our 15+ restaurant brands across markets, whereby the customer can scan the code on packaging / invoice and check everything from who cooked the food, their body temp, medical certificates; which kitchen it has come from and what quality check lists the kitchen has gone through; which ingredients at what quantity has been used to cook the dish and their source; what sanitisation process the packaging has gone through before it left our kitchen to be delivered to you.
The list is really long and getting longer. I suppose, a few years back we understood our core competence — which is bringing “culinary” and “technology” together to create powerful solutions to food problems. We understood that every cooking process is a combination of ingredients, dispensing, temperature and movement. If we can bring the knowledge of an expert chef and deep supply chain expertise into this process and codify it into Software+Robotics driven systems, we can solve the toughest problems for our customers and make their food missions unique, memorable and delightful. And we are just scratching the surface.
It gives us immense pride and excitement that we are working on pieces of this puzzle that very few players globally are working on, especially at scale. We started in India, and started with solving an India specific issue of costly and sparse brick and mortar infrastructure, through scaling Multiple Restaurant Brands on a tech-enabled cloud kitchen platform. A note (a little dated) on this can be found here.
But over time, we realised that we could dream bigger and solve problems on a global stage. As we speak, we are having technology licensing / franchising discussions across several countries around the world — Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Saudi Arabia to name a few. We are also bringing world famous restaurant brands to operate on our platform — in India and overseas. More on the last one when we seal our first deal in a week’s time.
While building this platform, we have built a solid Tech and Data team, spanning across full stack software, front-end app development, data science, product development, material science, mechatronics, industrial innovation design, robotics and automation, who relentlessly work with our culinary innovation team to bring our vision to life. We have been able to attract talent from some of the best design and technology schools in the country and from companies such as Amazon and Apple. But we are just getting started.
And this is why, we require more “Tech Superstars” to join the Rebel team — across disciplines. We think we are working right at the cutting edge of technology in a very very important industry, that has not changed for about 500 years. We can guarantee that you would be working on an absolutely magical frontier of technology that integrates hardware and software in a way a Tesla does or an iPhone does.
What are we looking for? In addition to subject matter expertise, you will have a passion for product development, creative thinking, the ability and willingness to reimagine “business as usual”, ability to build and solve problems of a scalable and distributed platform, and you will move fast, while keeping a laser-like focus on the customer. Needless to say, there shall be a significant opportunity for personal wealth creation for you through generous stock options, especially since you are joining at a time when we are building this up one layer at a time. Imagine the excitement of the engineers that worked on the first versions of the Tesla or the iPhone. This is the equivalent of those disruptive innovations: developed in India, made for the world.
If you find this exciting then do visit this page to write to us .
PS: Specific roles that we are looking to hire for are:
- Full Stack Engineers: Language agnostic, Strong computer science fundamentals, Problem solving skills — Node/Java/Go/Python/JS etc.
- Engineering Managers: Strong system design & architecture fundamentals. Keeping system NFRs in mind while managing deliveries. Drive engineering excellence practices and processes across the floor. Nurture, grow and take care of team members.
- Data engineers: Build cost-effective data platform to manage/process big data. Data science/ML engineers to add brain to data to answer relevant queries and make predictions
- Mechatronics Engineers : Responsible for detailed engineering design, risk and tolerance analysis at scale through experiments, POC and validations. Key skills include CAD, DFx, GD&T, Fluid mechanics, Thermal modelling, Actuators, Robot kinematics. Software: Proteus/Eagle, SolidWorks/CATIA/ProE, MATLAB, Simulink, LabVIEW
- Electrical Engineers : Responsible for automation of systems through sensing and control enabling IoT capability. Quick prototype development using DevBoards, followed by custom designed PCBs for scale. Key skills include knowledge of MCUs & PLCs, analog & digital sensors, Electronic systems design, PCB design, Connected system design, Development boards like Arduino, Pi, IoT development.
- Reliability Engineers: Resident subject matter expert on product reliability. Drive design for reliability as a way of life in the team, through component, module & system level FMEA, reliability test plan definition and execution. Apply statistical methods like Weibull analysis to understand results from tests and apply performance thresholds accordingly. An engineering background and solid understanding of the hardware development process is essential.
- Industrial Designers : Firm believer of User Centric Approach and Processes. Everything that forms the core subjects of Industrial Design; User Research, Human Factors, Cognitive Ergonomics, Inclusive Design, Sustainable Design Practices, Form Studies, Material and Manufacturing Processes, CAD, Rapid Prototyping Skills will be frequently required in the process of developing an innovative idea.
- Interaction Designer / UI/UX Designers: The interaction medium will include multiple touch-points from the digital, physical and virtual worlds. Integrating different verticals such as user research, product thinking and UX Strategies will be required to craft scalable experiences for users.
- Robotics S/W: In-depth expertise in the areas of Digital Image Processing, Data Analysis, Logic Level Programming, Assembly Level Programming. A fundamental grounding in mechatronics principles is ideal.
- Product Manager: Should have shown relentless customer obsession in the past. Smart and analytical, strategic yet execution focused, passionate about solving problems through technology, and must have shown some entrepreneurial leadership. He/she would have prior experience in most or all of the following areas: Market research (Voice of customer), Requirements definition, Product feature management, configuration management and value pricing with in-depth technology expertise.
Finally, do check out the culture @ Rebel before writing to us.
