Help us stop Nairobi throwing away good food.

Field Operations Lead

You walk one Nairobi neighbourhood every evening, sign up bakeries and cafés to sell their surplus food on SAVR, and make sure what they list actually sells.

This is a field job. Most of your week is spent on foot between 4pm and 8pm, walking into kitchens at closing time and talking to the person behind the counter. If that is the wrong shape of day for you, nothing further down this page will change that.

Why this role exists

SAVR is already built and running. The customer app is live at app.savr.co.ke, M-Pesa payments clear end to end, and merchants can list a bag, take payment and hand it over with a PIN. None of that is what is holding us back.

What is holding us back is that food businesses do not sign up through a website, and the ones that do sign up stop posting if their bags do not sell. Both of those problems are solved on foot, in the shop, at six in the evening. That is this job.

You are the first operations hire. You will work directly with the founder, and the playbook you write in your first three months is the one we use in every neighbourhood after this one.

What you will do

• Sign merchants, in person. Walk into bakeries, cafés, restaurants and small hotels in your neighbourhood at closing time. Ask the owner what happens to the food still on the tray at seven. Get them to say the number out loud, then show them what it is worth on SAVR.
• Never leave without a bag posted. A merchant who agrees is a maybe. A merchant who has posted a bag with you standing there is a merchant.
• Keep the bags selling. Watch which listings sell out and which sit, then fix the ones that sit — wrong price, wrong window, too few buyers nearby, a description nobody understands.
• Run launch nights. Get eight to twelve merchants posting on the same evening, make sure every waitlisted customer within two kilometres knows, and aim for everything to sell out.
• Tell merchants when they have sold. Message them within the hour of their first sale. Retention is driven by the merchant feeling the money arrive.
• Train and support. Show merchants how to post, how to redeem a PIN at the counter, and what to do when a customer does not turn up. You are the number they call.
• Report what you learn. A short written note each week: who signed, who stopped posting, what objection you heard most, what you would change. We act on these.

The numbers you own

You are measured on active supply and on whether it sells — not on merchants signed.

Your first 90 days

We start in Westlands. One neighbourhood, properly, before anything else opens.

What we need from you

We care about temperament and legwork far more than credentials. No degree is required and we will not ask for one.

Essential

• You can walk into a business you have never visited, ask for the owner, and start a useful conversation. This is the hardest part of the job and no training substitutes for being able to do it.
• One to three years doing something where you had to persuade strangers face to face: field sales, agent recruitment, distribution, merchant onboarding, NGO community work, or running your own small business.
• You are comfortable working evenings. The surplus is visible at 5:30pm, not at 10am.
• Fluent English and Kiswahili, and you can switch to whichever puts the person across the counter at ease.
• You are organised without being told. You keep your own merchant list current and you write a usable weekly note.
• A smartphone you are happy to work from, and comfort with WhatsApp and a simple web dashboard.
• You live in or near Nairobi and can reach Westlands daily.

Helpful, not required

• You already know Westlands, Kilimani or Lavington well enough to name ten food businesses from memory.
• Experience in food service — you have worked in or supplied a kitchen and know how closing time feels.
• You have run a small team, or want to within a year. This role grows into managing field reps.
• You care about food waste. Not essential, but the people who last in this job tend to.

What this job is not

We would rather lose you now than in month two.

• It is not a desk job. If most of your week is not spent walking, you are doing it wrong.
• The hours are unusual. The core of your day runs from about 2pm to 8pm, six days a week in the launch phase, because that is when kitchens know what is left. Mornings are yours for follow-up and admin.
• It is not a marketing role. You will not be running campaigns or managing an agency. You will be in shops.
• There is no established playbook yet. You are writing it. Some weeks will be mostly rejection.
• It is an early-stage company. Small team, founder-led, and the role will change as we learn.
• Signing merchants is not the win. If you sign thirty merchants and their bags do not sell, you have made the business worse. We will measure you accordingly.

Terms

The performance element is deliberately tied to merchants who keep posting and to bags that sell, not to signatures collected. We would rather pay well for twenty merchants who trade every week than cheaply for a hundred who do not.

How to apply

Send us three things:

1. Your CV, or just a few lines on what you have done. We will read either.
2. One paragraph on a time you persuaded a stranger to do something they had not planned to do.
3. The task below. It takes one afternoon and it matters more than the other two combined.

What happens next. We read every application. If the task is good, we will meet you — and the second half of that meeting will be the two of us walking into a shop together. You will know within a week either way.