Position Responsibilities :
The COE Machine Specialist is responsible for strengthening technical governance, standards, and decision quality for machine systems, store equipment, and supporting technical infrastructure across all formats. This role sits within the Regional Product Center of Excellence (COE) and acts as the technical reviewer and custodian for machine-related work delivered by Squads. The role is expected to review, recommend, challenge, and progressively strengthen technical gatekeeping across machinery-related projects. The role requires a strong engineering mindset and deep technical curiosity. The individual must understand how hardware, software, water systems, supporting equipment, preventive maintenance, calibration, and store operations come together to influence final beverage consistency, uptime, and customer experience. This is not a pure execution role. It is a technical governance role designed to improve pilot success rate, reduce repeated issues, and shape the long-term future of the ZUS machine ecosystem.
1. Governance, Review, & Recommendation
- Review and recommend on machine-related proposals, validations, pilots, and deliverables submitted by Squads.
- Assess whether machine-related recommendations are technically sound, scalable, practical, and aligned with business needs.
- Support the development of stronger COE governance mechanisms, including future echnical sign-off or veto authority where required.
- Ensure machinery decisions are not driven by short-term project pressure, vendor narratives, or incomplete technical evaluation.
2. Technical Custodianship
- Build and maintain deep technical understanding of the ZUS machine ecosystem across coffee machines, supporting store equipment, water systems and filtration, digital and software interface logic, preventive maintenance requirements, and user interaction and store workflow.
- Understand the impact of hardware, software, calibration, environmental setup, and operational handling on cup quality and performance consistency.
3. Future-State Development & Innovation
- Propose and shape what future ZUS machine systems should look like across all formats.
- Identify technical and commercial opportunities to improve beverage consistency, throughput and speed, ease of operation, serviceability, reliability and uptime, software usability, and scalability across markets.
- Work with internal teams and external partners to guide future machine development and improvement.
4. Root Cause Analysis & Permanent Resolution
- Investigate recurring machine and equipment issues with a structured and logical problem-solving approach.
- Distinguish between short-term symptom treatment and permanent root cause resolution.
- Recommend corrective actions across machine setup, software logic, water infrastructure, maintenance frameworks, calibration, or workflow design.
- Convert technical learnings into stronger standards and repeatable frameworks.
5. Validation Frameworks & Standards
- Build and maintain evaluation frameworks for machine and equipment assessment.
- Ensure frameworks cover beverage output quality, repeatability and consistency, uptime and reliability, ease of use, service and maintenance burden, operational practicality, and infrastructure dependency.
- Support and review technical validation, benchmarking, controlled pilots, and post-pilot assessment.
6. Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Work closely with Squad, QA, Operations, Academy, Facilities, Supply Chain, and vendors to align machine-related decisions with operational and commercial realities.
- Serve as the bridge between engineering logic and in-store beverage application.
- Contribute to capability-building and future team development within COE.
7. Key Success Measures
- Improvement in pilot success rate for machinery-related projects.
- Improvement in machine uptime, beverage consistency, and reliability.
- Reduction in machine-related complaints and repeated technical issues.
- Improvement in governance quality for machine-related reviews and recommendations.
- Strength of technical standards, validation frameworks, and institutional knowledge built.