Tock is only three years old but the idea originated several years ago out of a simple frustration: no-shows (people who bail on their reservation) are costing restaurants money. Nick Kokonas and Chef Grant Achatz opened Alinea here in Chicago to international fanfare in 2005 - now a perennial Michelin three star and widely considered one of the best restaurants in the world. For years they were spending $140,000 a year on staff dedicated to managing reservations and losing an average of $260,000 a year on no-shows. Convinced there had to be a better way, Nick built a crude ticketing system to solve the problems and lower labor costs. The homemade platform was a success. Nick founded Tock with Brian Fitzpatrick, founder of Google’s Chicago engineering office, to turn this simple idea into a robust product complete with all the tools a restaurant needs to succeed.
Tock is, at its simplest, a reservation system. Guests use Tock to make reservations and pay for experiences up front like chef’s tasting menus, kitchen tables, or special events, while restaurants use Tock to manage these reservations (book, edit, cancel, reschedule, etc), manage their guests (view and edit guest notes, reservation notes, tags, photos, dietary restrictions, reservation history, bios, etc), manage services (assign guests to tables, text message guests, accept walk-in guests, etc), and review financial reporting.
Running a restaurant isn’t easy. Even the world’s best restaurants struggle to make ends meet. From rising labor, real estate, and food costs, to legal complexity regarding tipping and overtime pay, to unsustainable no-show rates, a restaurant is faced with a daunting task at becoming profitable. We want to change that! We want to solve the problems that other restaurant software has deemed too hard or too complex. All while making it fast and beautiful.
Many of the world’s best restaurants use Tock, from Alinea, Milk Room, and Smyth and Loyalist here in Chicago, to Eleven Madison Park, The French Laundry, The Fat Duck, minibar, Noma, Atelier Crenn, and hundreds more across the world.
You'll lead the exploration, strategy, and design of new features, seeking to change how the restaurant industry operates and how guests across the world explore, discover, and book unique experiences. You'll be respondible for research, prototyping, designing, and then iterating on these ideas, all alongside your design and engineering teammates.
We’re looking for someone with at least five years of product design experience. You're capable of leading projects from start to finish and have strong leadership skills to foster a healthy environment between design and engineering. You're curious about the problems Tock is solving and interested in questioning restaurant conventions. You have a solid understanding of front-end capabilities and app and web patterns. You have high standards for how your designs look and work but you strive to ship quickly and iterate frequently based on feedback. You're driven by metrics, data, and research while always vouching for and empathizing with the end user. You also keep the business's constraints (time, budget, competition, etc.) in mind while exploring design solutions.
We are a small startup but take the commitment to our team very seriously. We offer health, dental, and vision insurance, 401k matching, daily catered lunches, competitive salaries, and equity in the company.
If you’ve made it this far, then we’re already off to a good start. Next we’d love to see your work and a letter answering the simple question, why Tock?
If you have questions, let us know.