Smart retail careers
Build a store that never closes, and the systems that keep it honest.
Smart retail careers at 8Kava mean building unattended retail end to end: the hardware, the models, the routes and the payments. Engineers, researchers and field technicians work from one Fort Collins building on a fleet of more than 3,400 connected retail points. Your work ships to hallways, hospitals and job sites, not to a slide deck.
- connected retail points
- 3,400+connected retail points
- transactions in the trailing 12 months
- 11.8Mtransactions in the trailing 12 months
- fleet, watched from Fort Collins
- 24/7fleet, watched from Fort Collins
Short feedback loops, with real food at the end of them.
Most software never touches anything cold. Ours does. A change to a recognition model shows up in restock counts. A change to lock firmware shows up at a hospital at 3 a.m. A better forecast shows up as one fewer truck stop and one more full shelf.
That makes the work concrete, and it makes it shared. The person tuning a forecast sits near the person who designed the shelf load cells, and both can ask a field technician what actually happened at the site.
- Hardware, software and the Network Operations Center in one building.
- Problems measured in the field, not just in a test suite.
- A fleet large enough that small improvements add up fast.
The kinds of people we hire
We describe disciplines rather than post a list of titles. If your skills fit one of these and the problems interest you, we want to hear from you.
Hardware engineering
Coolers, lockers, dispensers and retrofit modules: refrigeration, electromagnetic locks, load cells, power and the enclosures that survive both lobbies and trailheads.
Machine learning
On-device recognition that fuses vision with ±2 g weight sensing, plus item-level demand forecasting across thousands of devices.
Operations research
Pre-kitting, route sequencing, expiry-aware pricing and the guardrails that keep Kava Agent's decisions sensible.
Payments
Contactless, wallets, badges, payroll deduct and subsidies, working through any processor, with 72-hour offline buffering.
Field service
Installing, repairing and retrofitting across the Colorado Front Range, with same-day response as the standard.
Network operations
Watching the connected fleet around the clock and turning a warm compressor into a ticket before it becomes a spoiled shelf.
Where each discipline shows up
- Before dawn
Pick lists are drafted
Forecasts and route plans built by machine-learning and operations-research work become tomorrow's driver instructions.
- Morning
Restocks are reconciled
Load cells and cameras recognize the restock, so the system knows exactly what was added.
- Midday
The lunch rush settles
Thousands of taps across badges, wallets and payroll deduct, each one settled through the payments stack.
- Afternoon
A compressor runs warm
Telemetry flags it, the NOC opens a ticket and a field technician brings the right part.
- Evening
Markdowns go live
Expiry-aware pricing steps down tonight's sandwiches, inside the operator's guardrails.
- 3 a.m.
Someone eats a real meal
A night-shift nurse taps, opens and takes. Every discipline is in that transaction, and none of them is visible.
Habits we keep on purpose
Ride the route
Everyone spends time in the field. It's hard to design a pick list for someone whose day you've never seen.
Write it down
Decisions, trade-offs and incident notes are written so the next person doesn't have to guess.
Name the trade-off
We say when a format is wrong for a site, and we say it inside the team, too.
Ship small, measure honestly
Small changes, real metrics and published numbers we can defend line by line.
Privacy is a design input
No images of faces stored or sent is a constraint we build around, not a setting.
Respect the 5 a.m. shift
The people who restock at dawn are the customers we design for first.
Benefits that respect the work
We want people to do careful work for a long time, so we try to make that easy. The details depend on the role and are shared in full during the hiring process, in writing.
- Health coverage for you and your dependents.
- Paid time off that people actually take, plus holidays.
- The tools and lab equipment the work needs.
- Paid time in the field with routes and installs.
- Support for courses and conferences tied to your discipline.
Four steps, no puzzles
Write to hi@8kava.com
Put the discipline in the subject line. Tell us what you've built and which 8Kava problem you'd want to work on first.
Show us something real
A repository, a schematic, a model write-up, a route you improved, a repair you're proud of. Work beats a résumé.
Talk with the team
Conversations with the people you'd work alongside, about the work rather than trivia.
A practical session
A focused working session on a problem close to what we actually do, followed by a clear answer either way.
What kind of feedback do you want from your work?
In most jobs, success is a number on a dashboard. Here it's also a third-shift picker who finds a real lunch at 2 a.m., a driver who skips a stop that didn't need visiting, a cooler that locks itself before warm food gets sold. Which of those would you want to be responsible for?
Careers questions
Do you post open roles?
We describe disciplines rather than publish a list of titles. If your experience fits one of them, write to hi@8kava.com with the discipline in the subject line. We read every message, and we'll tell you if the timing isn't right.
Do I need vending or retail experience?
No. Most of what we do borrows from refrigeration, embedded systems, computer vision, forecasting, logistics and payments. Curiosity about how food gets to people at 3 a.m. matters more than industry background.
Where is the work based?
Our product team, hardware lab and Network Operations Center are in Fort Collins, Colorado, and most work happens there. Field technicians work across the Colorado Front Range.
We run a field service company. Can we work with 8Kava?
Outside the Front Range, field service is delivered by vetted, 8Kava-trained field partners. If your company installs or services equipment in a US metro, write to hi@8kava.com and tell us where you operate.
Where to go next
Tell us what you'd fix first.
Pick any part of the system, from a door hinge to a route plan, and tell us how you'd make it better. That's the best introduction we can get.