Jobs at Panera Bread

Leads consumer-facing digital product strategy and execution, including customer research, business cases, product roadmaps, requirements, agile development, UAT, releases, analytics, vendor partnerships, and process improvement. Partners with UX, technology, and business stakeholders to improve customer experiences, achieve business goals, and drive key performance indicators.

Provide Tier 1 and Tier 2 technical support for employees, troubleshooting hardware, software, operating systems, applications, devices, and Microsoft 365 services. Configure and deploy equipment, manage IT assets and user accounts, support endpoint management, security, access, ticketing, conference room technology, and patching. Document solutions, maintain records, assist with technology deployments and office moves, participate in on-call support, and contribute to continuous improvement.

Designs, develops, and maintains automated testing frameworks for web and mobile applications using Playwright and Appium. Integrates tests into CI/CD pipelines, applies AI-assisted test generation and maintenance, analyzes failures, improves automation coverage, and partners with engineering teams on shift-left quality practices. Supports cross-browser, accessibility, visual, API, and end-to-end validation for customer-facing digital platforms.

Analyzes IT expenditures, budgets, forecasts, billing, and financial performance. Supports monthly close, GCP expense tracking, franchise IT billing, reporting, cost-benefit analysis, vendor expenditures, and process improvement. Collaborates with IT, accounting, FP&A, and project teams to explain variances, manage risks, optimize costs, and support strategic initiatives.

Supports cafe event management, initiative deployment, and shared services for retail operations. Owns event and initiative tracking, documentation, communications, open-item resolution, process compliance, system updates, and cross-functional coordination with field teams, franchisees, and internal departments. Maintains reference materials, supports testing and rollout activities, manages configuration and hierarchy services, and identifies process improvements.

Design, build, deploy, and support cloud-native ecommerce applications using Java, Spring Boot, GCP, microservices, serverless technologies, and event-driven architecture. Develop CI/CD automation, secure services, automated testing, observability, and AI-assisted development capabilities. Contribute to architecture standards, cloud modernization, performance optimization, cost management, and application reliability while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Build, support, and improve CI/CD pipelines, cloud and on-premises infrastructure platforms, automation tooling, and Kubernetes environments. Collaborate with development, QA, and infrastructure teams to improve software delivery, reliability, and developer productivity. Responsibilities include monitoring systems, troubleshooting incidents, supporting platform upgrades and migrations, maintaining source control standards, and contributing to documentation. The role requires foundational DevOps experience and offers opportunities to grow into senior engineering responsibilities.

Manages HR compliance auditing across federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Develops audit plans, evaluates policies and procedures, identifies risks and violations, recommends corrective actions, and supports implementation. Maintains regulatory documentation, tracks allegations and responses, prepares leadership reports, monitors legislative developments, and collaborates with internal and external stakeholders on employment regulations, benefits, vendor contracts, and mandated communications.

Designs, builds, and maintains CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code solutions, cloud and on-premises platforms, and containerized workloads. Improves automation, reliability, security, performance, and developer productivity while supporting GCP, Kubernetes, and virtualization environments. Collaborates across engineering teams, troubleshoots platform issues, promotes DevOps practices, and mentors engineers.

Develop and maintain Salesforce-related components and full-stack technical solutions. Design, test, implement, and support Salesforce projects; assess technical and business solutions; create system and functional requirements; demonstrate features; support Salesforce developers; and serve as subject matter expert for Sales Cloud and the Donations Platform. The role also leads Agile Sprint teams and manages multiple concurrent projects.

Build and operate production machine learning platforms and pipelines, including deployment, monitoring, retraining, governance, and lifecycle management. Maintain and improve enterprise sales forecasting models by diagnosing accuracy degradation, engineering features, tuning algorithms, and evaluating performance. Deploy workloads on Vertex AI and BigQuery, operationalize generative AI, manage infrastructure as code, ensure data and model lineage, troubleshoot failures, and collaborate with Data Science, Engineering, Security, Finance, Operations, and Supply Chain.

Define and govern enterprise cloud data strategy, reference architecture, data models, governance, security, quality, and AI foundations on GCP. Architect data lakes, warehouses, semantic layers, event-driven systems, and agentic AI platforms while establishing standards for lineage, cataloging, DLP, IAM, networking, and observability. Lead prototypes, mentor engineering teams, and partner with security, compliance, and DevOps to deliver scalable, repeatable enterprise solutions.

Owns Panera’s Brand Standards Review program, including audit content, standards alignment, third-party administration, reporting, appeals, vendor performance, and field communications. Analyzes brand standards findings alongside food safety, health department, pest activity, and corrective-action data to identify root causes. Develops dashboards, scorecards, and business reviews; leads continuous improvement, corrective actions, pilots, training materials, and operational enhancements across multiple locations.

Leads cross-functional IT projects supporting business initiatives and new cafe openings. Responsibilities include coordinating teams, managing project capacity and timelines, improving processes, advocating for business technology needs, troubleshooting issues, collaborating across departments, and providing project status updates.

Leads Panera’s integrated operations standards and audit programs, overseeing governance, strategy, reporting, continuous improvement, food safety, brand standards, and pest-management support. Manages audit program leaders and third-party providers, ensuring data accuracy, service levels, risk identification, corrective actions, and executive reporting. Drives root-cause analysis, operational improvements, pilots, and future-solution rollouts while aligning cross-functional stakeholders and presenting recommendations to senior leadership.

Leads Panera’s portfolio of bakery-cafe openings, remodels, ownership transitions, closures, relocations, and other growth initiatives. Oversees critical-path governance, readiness planning, opening orders, training, vendors, operational support, and post-opening stabilization. Manages two Growth Operations Managers, coordinates cross-functional stakeholders, assigns projects, monitors risks and dependencies, develops dashboards and executive updates, and drives process improvements based on lessons learned.

Leads complex cross-functional projects from discovery through rollout and closeout. Develops integrated plans, manages scope, schedules, budgets, risks, vendors, dependencies, and resources, and drives stakeholder alignment and executive governance. Builds change-management and operational-readiness plans, facilitates decisions, resolves barriers, tracks outcomes, and provides executive-ready reporting. Partners across operations, marketing, technology, supply chain, finance, HR, and other functions to deliver initiatives on time, within budget, and according to business objectives.

Manages bakery-cafe openings, remodels, ownership transitions, closures, relocations, and other portfolio changes. Owns project critical paths, milestones, dependencies, orders, vendors, readiness reviews, risk tracking, recovery plans, and stabilization. Coordinates cross-functional teams across Operations, Development, Franchise Operations, Supply Chain, Technology, HR, Marketing, Facilities, Finance, and vendors. Maintains dashboards and improves project processes, checklists, communications, and readiness tools.

Designs and maintains scalable Backend-for-Frontend services for web, mobile, kiosk, and digital ordering platforms. Builds secure, high-performance REST and GraphQL APIs using Node.js and TypeScript; integrates microservices and third-party systems; implements caching, resiliency, CI/CD, observability, and AI-assisted development practices. Collaborates cross-functionally, resolves production issues, optimizes performance, establishes architecture standards, and mentors junior engineers.

Leads consumer insights for menu strategy, culinary innovation, and new product development. Oversees qualitative, quantitative, sensory, and concept research; translates consumer, category, competitive, and behavioral data into actionable recommendations. Partners with culinary and marketing leadership to identify trends, optimize menus, and shape innovation pipelines. Manages external research partners, budgets, one direct report, and in-house research execution while delivering compelling strategic narratives.