About CookUnity

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 35 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

About The Team:

The Personalization Squad is responsible for creating and enhancing the systems that power personalized user experiences across CookUnity’s platform. We focus on delivering tailor-made content, recommendations, and experiences based on user preferences and behaviors. By leveraging data and advanced algorithms, our team ensures that every interaction feels unique and relevant to the individual.

As part of the core engineering team, we collaborate closely with Data teams, Product Managers, and cross-functional stakeholders to build and maintain scalable, resilient systems that enhance user engagement. Our mission is to create personalized experiences that drive satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement for CookUnity.

To support CookUnity’s growth, we are continuously evolving our personalization systems to be more intelligent, data-driven, and adaptable. This is an exciting opportunity to solve complex engineering challenges, influence the future of personalized content, and have a direct impact on the experience of millions of users in a fast-growing digital ecosystem.

The Role:

As a Staff Full Stack Engineer on the Personalization Squad, you will play a crucial role in leading technical initiatives, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers as we scale our user personalization infrastructure. You’ll work on a range of high-impact and technically challenging problems, including user preference modeling, behavior-driven recommendations, content delivery optimization, and personalization algorithms.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced engineer who thrives on complexity and enjoys designing scalable, resilient, and high-performing backend systems. You will collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product managers, and cross-functional teams—including Data teams—to build and improve mission-critical infrastructure that enables personalized user experiences across our platform. Together with Data teams, you will develop data-driven solutions that transform user behavior insights into seamless, personalized content delivery.

We’re looking for someone who can bring strong system design expertise, lead projects from concept to deployment, and set a high technical bar for the team while driving forward best practices in software engineering. You’ll have the opportunity to work on key aspects of our personalization engine that directly enhance user engagement and satisfaction by leveraging data-driven insights and collaboration.

You'll be expected to work from our Brooklyn office 2-3 days per week.

Our Tech Stack:

• Languages: JavaScript and Kotlin
• Frameworks: ReactJS, Redux, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL.
• Databases: MySQL & PostgreSQL.
• Infrastructure: AWS Based: Kubernetes, S3, CloudFront and RDS.
• Agile Methodology

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable backend services that power CookUnity’s personalization systems.
• Define and drive architectural improvements that enhance system reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product and Data teams to provide our users tailor-made content that adjust to their needs.
• Mentor and guide other engineers, setting a high standard for technical excellence and a culture of proactive ownership.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, AI adoptions that improve our backend stack and development velocity.
• Improve system observability, performance, and resilience, ensuring uptime and smooth operation of revenue-critical systems.
• Contribute as a hands-on engineer, writing clean, well-tested, and efficient code, leading by example.
• Lead technical planning and project execution, breaking down complex problems into manageable solutions and driving initiatives to on-time completion.

Minimum Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in software development, with expertise in Kotlin, React and SQL databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL).
• Proven experience in architecting and scaling complex backend systems in a high-growth, fast-paced environment.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, service-oriented architecture, and event-driven architecture.
• Deep understanding of system performance and scalability best practices.
• Proven ability to translate complex, ambiguous requirements into clear, actionable plans that drive alignment and timely delivery.
• Advanced English communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated experience in mentoring and guiding engineers.

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience implementing or integrating machine learning models for personalization, such as recommendation algorithms, user clustering, or predictive analytics.
• Familiarity with data pipelines, data lakes, and working with large-scale datasets. Understanding how to work with Data teams to ensure data availability, quality, and consistency in a personalized recommendation system.
• Experience with DevOps tools and cloud platforms, including Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS.

Benefits:

🩺  Health Insurance coverage.

🌅 401k Plan.

📈 We grow, you grow: Stock Options Plan granted on Day 1.

⛱ PTO policy and paid sick days / Unlimited PTO.

🗓️ 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical.

🐣 Paid family leave.

🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises.

🥘 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Wellness perks: access to a nutritional coach and fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle.

👩🏾‍🏫 Personalized Spanish coach.

🌟 Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!

Learn More About CookUnity:

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!

If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!

CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.