Title:  Venture Lab Engineer (Innovation Ops)

About Us

About CDV

Compass Digital Ventures (CDV) is the innovation and corporate venture arm of Compass Group, focused on driving the future of foodservice through open innovation. CDV works with the startup and venture capital ecosystem to identify strategic opportunities, innovative pilots, and cutting-edge technologies. Through CDV we create pathways for successful and disruptive startup solutions to grow and enhance the business and operations at Compass.

As the Venture Build Ops Engineer, you are the critical bridge between a brilliant idea and a tangible, testable proof of concept (POC) and pilot. You are a hands-on builder with a strategic mindset, responsible for designing, building, and executing the technical side of our innovation pilots. You will be building and running a “venture lab” to test PoC’s and Pilots. You will be instrumental in building a repeatable, scalable "playbook" for innovation pilots, helping us to learn quickly and make informed decisions on which ventures to scale. 

This role requires a unique combination of engineering expertise and a strong business acumen, enabling you to build products that not only work but also effectively answer core business questions.

Job Summary

Key Responsibilities

• PoC / Pilot Program Execution:

  • Serve as the lead builder for proofs of concept (POCs) and pilots, taking ideas from strategic brief to a working product.

  • Choose the right tools and technologies to build prototypes and pilots quickly, effectively, and with a focus on speed-to-market. Highlighting the metrics

  • Manage the end-to-end process of building and deploying pilots, ensuring they are functional and stable for user testing.
    
    

• Venture Lab Management:

• Build and manage a venture lab environment to simulate a real cafe setting for continuous testing of POCs and pilots.

• Be responsible for the physical and digital infrastructure of the lab, ensuring it is a reliable and repeatable environment for experimentation.

• Oversee the technical setup and maintenance of all hardware and software within the lab to ensure a seamless testing experience.

• Incorporate new areas in the lab as we begin testing innovative solutions and technologies (i.e how do we test robotic dishwasher, or computer vision in the cafe / kitchen)
  
  

• Testing & Validation:

  • Design and implement a structured testing framework to validate key hypotheses of each POC and clear success metrics

  • Set up data collection mechanisms to capture meaningful insights on user behavior, product-market fit, and technical feasibility.

  • Analyze pilot outcomes to provide clear, actionable learnings, and inform go/no-go decisions for future investment.
    
    

• Playbook Development:

  • Contribute to and maintain a standardized "innovation pilot playbook" for the organization.

  • Create and document reusable codebases, deployment scripts, and technical best practices to accelerate future pilots.

  • Champion a culture of learning by actively conducting post-mortems on every pilot, regardless of outcome, to continuously refine our process.
    
    

• Strategic Collaboration:

  • Work closely with venture ops, venture innovation team, partnerships, and business stakeholders to understand the core business questions each pilot is designed to answer.

  • Translate strategic needs into technical requirements, ensuring that every feature and function is built to provide meaningful data.

  • Manage expectations and communicate technical progress and challenges clearly to a non-technical audience