Experience Design Lead

Do you enjoy working at the intersection of technology and design? Are you always looking for the best way to make an experience engaging? Do you want to get in on the ground floor of a fast growing, entrepreneurial-minded business? If this is you, we want you to join our team.

CAVA is a fast-growing culinary brand with a portfolio of fast-casual restaurants and a packaged goods line dedicated to fresh, Mediterranean-inspired, better-for-you cuisine. Born from a full-service restaurant collaboration between three first-generation Greek-American childhood friends in the Washington, DC, area, our mission is to fuel full lives through a bold and innovative food culture. Our chef-driven fast-casual format currently has more than 60 restaurants across ten states, with further expansion ahead. From our restaurants to our Support Center, CAVA team members foster a culture of transparency, humility, positivity, thoughtfulness, and fanaticism.

CAVA is seeking an Experience Design Lead to help us imagine and create impactful customer experiences. This position is a member of our Digital Product and Strategy teams and responsible for the experience of our mobile app, website, and future digital products on emerging channels, with a focus on ordering. The right candidate is a creative leader with a passion for the visually engaging and for reducing the complex, making strategic design decisions that both align with the CAVA brand and seek ways to enhance it. We’re searching for someone who will always be thinking of smarter, quicker, and more elegant ways to help our customers interact with our menu and brand.

You will:
• Lead a design team creating features and improvements for the CAVA digital experience
• Lead customer research to develop new features.
• Convey concepts into interaction flows, wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes that lead to intuitive user experience.
• Take a hands-on role: leading designs, personas, sitemaps, and whatever is needed to communicate the team's thinking.
• Work closely with in-house developers in an agile environment to implement and merge front-end enhancements to digital applications.
• Work closely with partner design agencies to grow CAVA’s design scope. Serve as a steward for the CAVA brand and customer.
• Identify areas of improvement and devise elegant solutions for testing.
• Take a user-centered design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs.
• Partner with the creative team (visual designers and content experts), engineers, restaurant operations, and passionate CAVA customers to bring new digital experience to life.

You Have:
• 7+ years experience creating interfaces, large-scale digital experiences, or applications, and a BA/BS in a related field. Customer-facing app design and e-commerce experience is preferred.
• 3+ years experience in a creative leadership role
• Desire to produce the best digital designs in the industry hands-down
• Proven knowledge of the fundamentals: interaction design, user-centered experience design, and the creative process, as well as new platforms and technologies. Ability to provide clear creative direction as well as timely and helpful feedback to improve creative processes that keep work on budget and schedule.
• Expertise in Sketch, InVision, Adobe Creative Suite
• Passion for a seamless, fun, and inspiring user experience and an ability to empathize with a wide range of customer needs.
• A solid grasp of user-centered design, research and test methodologies, and usability/accessibility concerns
• Successful track record leading interdisciplinary teams in creating great products, with proven skills in mentoring, presenting, partnerships and visual communication.
• Risk taking in design, pushing past the obvious, and making something you love.
• A collaborative mindset and excited to work with cross-functional teams and external agencies
• Strong ability to prioritize work and resources across engagements based on short- and long-term need. Timelines, budgets and priorities change, and we need someone who can roll with it.
• An unwavering commitment to advocate for the customer’s best experience

We offer:
• Competitive base salary and annual bonus potential
• Benefits options including: medical (with potential health savings account contribution from CAVA), dental, vision, telemedicine, short and long term disability insurance, life insurance, pet insurance and 401K with CAVA match
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• Free CAVA food
• Four Community days per year to help the world with acts of services/volunteering
• Continuous learning and training opportunities to enhance your skill set
• The opportunity to be on the ground floor of helping craft the vision of a rapidly growing brand

CAVA – joining “A culture, not a concept™”

Do you enjoy working at the intersection of technology and design? Are you always looking for the best way to make an experience engaging? Do you want to get in on the ground floor of a fast growing, entrepreneurial-minded business? If this is you, we want you to join our team.

CAVA is a fast-growing culinary brand with a portfolio of fast-casual restaurants and a packaged goods line dedicated to fresh, Mediterranean-inspired, better-for-you cuisine. Born from a full-service restaurant collaboration between three first-generation Greek-American childhood friends in the Washington, DC, area, our mission is to fuel full lives through a bold and innovative food culture. Our chef-driven fast-casual format currently has more than 60 restaurants across ten states, with further expansion ahead. From our restaurants to our Support Center, CAVA team members foster a culture of transparency, humility, positivity, thoughtfulness, and fanaticism.

CAVA is seeking an Experience Design Lead to help us imagine and create impactful customer experiences. This position is a member of our Digital Product and Strategy teams and responsible for the experience of our mobile app, website, and future digital products on emerging channels, with a focus on ordering. The right candidate is a creative leader with a passion for the visually engaging and for reducing the complex, making strategic design decisions that both align with the CAVA brand and seek ways to enhance it. We’re searching for someone who will always be thinking of smarter, quicker, and more elegant ways to help our customers interact with our menu and brand.

You will:
• Lead a design team creating features and improvements for the CAVA digital experience
• Lead customer research to develop new features.
• Convey concepts into interaction flows, wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes that lead to intuitive user experience.
• Take a hands-on role: leading designs, personas, sitemaps, and whatever is needed to communicate the team's thinking.
• Work closely with in-house developers in an agile environment to implement and merge front-end enhancements to digital applications.
• Work closely with partner design agencies to grow CAVA’s design scope. Serve as a steward for the CAVA brand and customer.
• Identify areas of improvement and devise elegant solutions for testing.
• Take a user-centered design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs.
• Partner with the creative team (visual designers and content experts), engineers, restaurant operations, and passionate CAVA customers to bring new digital experience to life.

You Have:
• 7+ years experience creating interfaces, large-scale digital experiences, or applications, and a BA/BS in a related field. Customer-facing app design and e-commerce experience is preferred.
• 3+ years experience in a creative leadership role
• Desire to produce the best digital designs in the industry hands-down
• Proven knowledge of the fundamentals: interaction design, user-centered experience design, and the creative process, as well as new platforms and technologies. Ability to provide clear creative direction as well as timely and helpful feedback to improve creative processes that keep work on budget and schedule.
• Expertise in Sketch, InVision, Adobe Creative Suite
• Passion for a seamless, fun, and inspiring user experience and an ability to empathize with a wide range of customer needs.
• A solid grasp of user-centered design, research and test methodologies, and usability/accessibility concerns
• Successful track record leading interdisciplinary teams in creating great products, with proven skills in mentoring, presenting, partnerships and visual communication.
• Risk taking in design, pushing past the obvious, and making something you love.
• A collaborative mindset and excited to work with cross-functional teams and external agencies
• Strong ability to prioritize work and resources across engagements based on short- and long-term need. Timelines, budgets and priorities change, and we need someone who can roll with it.
• An unwavering commitment to advocate for the customer’s best experience

We offer:
• Competitive base salary and annual bonus potential
• Benefits options including: medical (with potential health savings account contribution from CAVA), dental, vision, telemedicine, short and long term disability insurance, life insurance, pet insurance and 401K with CAVA match
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• Free CAVA food
• Four Community days per year to help the world with acts of services/volunteering
• Continuous learning and training opportunities to enhance your skill set
• The opportunity to be on the ground floor of helping craft the vision of a rapidly growing brand

CAVA – joining “A culture, not a concept™”