Product Engineer

ABOUT RETHINK FOOD Rethink Food is a chef-led nonprofit building a better food system. We work with restaurants, community-based organizations, funders, government partners, healthcare organizations, and our own Sustainable Community Kitchen to provide high-quality meals while supporting local small businesses and creating jobs. Our work is operationally complex. Meals are planned, funded, produced, delivered, verified, reported, reimbursed, and measured across many partners and systems. Today, too much of that work still happens through spreadsheets, email, manual follow-up, and disconnected tools. We are looking for a product-minded engineer who can help turn that complexity into simple, useful software. THE ROLE Rethink Food is hiring a Product Engineer, Internal Tools & Automation to build practical tools that make our teams faster, clearer, and more effective. This role is for someone who loves solving messy real-world problems. You will sit close to operators, program teams, finance, development, and leadership to understand where work is breaking down, then build tools that fix it. You may build a dashboard in the morning, automate a reporting workflow in the afternoon, and spend time with the kitchen team the next day understanding why a process does not match what is in the spreadsheet. This is not a traditional corporate software role. It is not an IT help desk role. It is not a research role. It is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who wants to ship useful tools quickly and see them used in the real world. WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON Internal Tools That Replace Manual Work Build lightweight products that reduce repetitive work across Rethink Food. Examples include: • Intake forms and workflows for community meal requests. • Tools for tracking meal counts, deliveries, partner needs, and exceptions. • Internal dashboards for operations, finance, programs, and development. • Approval flows for new partners, vendors, restaurants, and programs. • Simple admin panels that allow nontechnical staff to update records safely. • Tools that turn messy spreadsheets into structured, reliable data. • Automated reminders, alerts, and follow-ups for missing information. The goal is to help teams stop chasing information and start acting on it. Reporting and Dashboard Products Help build practical reporting tools that answer questions like: • How many meals did we produce and deliver this week? • Which programs are on track or off track? • Which partners need follow-up? • Where are we missing meal counts, invoices, delivery confirmations, or feedback? • Which contracts or programs are over budget? • What changed since last week? • What needs attention today? These tools should be simple, fast, and trusted by the people using them. AI-Assisted Workflows Use AI to help staff move faster, especially when information is trapped in emails, documents, forms, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Examples may include: • Extracting key details from partner emails. • Summarizing delivery issues or program updates. • Drafting recurring internal reports. • Turning meeting notes into tasks. • Flagging missing information before it becomes a problem. • Searching internal documents and program history. • Creating human-reviewed automations for intake, reconciliation, and follow-up. The focus is practical AI: tools that save time, reduce errors, and make work easier. Data Cleanup and Integrations Help connect and clean up information across systems such as: • BigQuery. • HubSpot. • Google Sheets. • Google Drive. • Slack. • Finance and accounting tools. • Existing Rethink portals. • Partner and program spreadsheets. You will help make Rethink’s data easier to understand, easier to trust, and easier to use. WHAT YOU WILL DO • Build full-stack internal products from idea to launch. • Create clean, usable interfaces for nontechnical users. • Build backend services, APIs, scripts, automations, and integrations. • Work with messy operational data and turn it…