Director of Operations

Director of Operations

Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Status: Full-Time

Compensation: $90,000–$110,000+ (Depending on experience) + Performance Bonus

Benefits: 401k | Health Stipend | Paid Parking | PTO | 50% Meal Discount

Key Highlights: Operational Authority | Growth-Stage Impact | Founder Access | Scale Architect Role

Why You’ll Love Working Here

Bistro To Go is a Pittsburgh hospitality organization that has spent more than twenty years building something most catering companies never achieve: a reputation so strong that clients return year after year, not just for the food, but for the relationships. The team executes drop-off catering, full-service weddings, corporate events, and community gatherings at a level that earned them the 2025 Pittsburgh Caterer of the Year award from Pittsburgh Magazine. Founder Nikki Heckman has built the company around a belief that when people feel genuinely invested in and supported, they produce extraordinary work. That philosophy runs through every layer of the organization.

This role is the operational backbone of the company. The Hospitality Leader owns everything that happens after the sale, from scheduling and logistics to team deployment, event execution, and event-level profitability. You will step into the seat the founder has held since the company’s inception, and within six months, your presence should be felt not by your visibility but by the founder’s absence from a role she no longer needs to fill. This is not a support position. It is the highest operational leadership role in the organization, directly responsible for protecting the revenue, the client experience, and the team that delivers both.

You’ll work directly alongside Nikki and an ownership-level operations partner who leads the on-site event teams. The company also partners with staffing subcontractors for event personnel, manages a fleet of vehicles and equipment for off-site deployments, and coordinates with an internal planning department that handles rentals, site visits, and tastings. The infrastructure is real but evolving. This is a company that has operated at a high level through sheer talent and effort, and now needs a leader who can build the systems, SOPs, and scalable processes that match the quality of the work already being produced.

Bistro To Go currently operates at $6.5 million in annual revenue with a mandate to reach $12 million by year’s end and $20 million within the next eighteen months. The company is preparing for a multi-location expansion, and the person in this role will build the operational model that enables that growth. For a leader who wants to architect something lasting, this is the seat.

Pittsburgh is a city where hospitality matters. From historic law firms and universities to riverfront venues and corporate campuses, the events market is deep, and the relationships are real. Bistro serves a wide range of clients across the region, including a significant nonprofit base. For someone who wants their work to mean something beyond logistics and spreadsheets, this city and this company deliver that.

What We Value

Hospitality as a Standard

Hospitality is the operating standard that drives everything. Whether interacting with a client, a venue partner, or a team member returning equipment at midnight, we protect the brand’s experience and reputation through excellence and service at every level. The Hospitality Leader sets that tone for the entire operation.

Ownership Without Hero Dependency

When something needs to get done, we step in and make it happen. But we also recognize that repeatedly being the hero is not a scalable leadership strategy. This leader builds systems, develops people, and distributes responsibility so the organization does not depend on any one person’s overextension to succeed.

Team-First Mentality

The team is everything. Great leaders include others in decisions that impact execution, avoid making unilateral changes that create downstream chaos, and show up with high levels of communication and collaboration. The way a leader carries themselves before an event directly shapes how that team performs on site without supervision.

Grace with High Standards

This is a job of perfection that will never reach perfection. Expectations are high, but there must be grace in how those expectations are enforced. Standards are not weaponized or diluted. Leaders here coach toward improvement, provide structured feedback, and understand that timing and tone matter as much as the correction itself.

Coachability & Humility

The leaders who have earned the most trust at Bistro are those who came in with confidence in their skills but humility about the system. They asked questions before offering answers, learned how Bistro operates before proposing changes, and over time built the credibility to reshape things for the better. This organization values people who actively seek feedback and demonstrate visible behavioral adjustment.

What You’ll Do

• Own the full post-sale operation through scheduling, logistics, team deployment, equipment coordination, and event execution across all revenue streams, including daily corporate deliveries, staffed events, and weddings, ensuring every event meets Bistro’s standard for flawless execution.

• Build and manage the staffing infrastructure by coordinating internal team members, subcontracted event staff, and driver logistics across a multi-vehicle fleet, ensuring the right people and equipment arrive at the right place every time.

• Lead, train, and develop the hospitality team alongside the on-site operations partner, establishing onboarding protocols, brand standards documentation, event checklists, and performance feedback systems that hold up across internal staff and subcontractor teams.

• Own event-level profitability by tracking labor cost percentages, staffing efficiency, and operational margins against revenue targets and holding the team accountable to financial discipline without compromising execution quality.

• Serve as the operational bridge between sales, culinary, planning, and event teams — ensuring that every handoff from the point of sale through post-event follow-up is synchronized, communicated, and executed without gaps.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $90,000 – $110,000+, depending on experience

• Performance-based bonus structure tied to operational outcomes

• Health stipend

• 401k

• 2 weeks PTO

• Paid parking

• 50% employee meal discount

• Relocation assistance available for the right candidate

Why This Job Stands Out

• The Founder’s Seat, Transferred to You: This is not a newly imagined position; it is the role the founder has personally held for more than twenty years. Every system, every client relationship, every operational decision has run through this seat. The person who steps in inherits real authority and real institutional knowledge, with direct access to the founder during the transition. That kind of handoff is rare in hospitality.

• Build the Engine for a $20 Million Operation: Bistro To Go is growing aggressively, with a path from $6.5 million to $20 million and multi-location expansion on the horizon. The Hospitality Leader will be the person who builds the operational infrastructure that makes that scale possible. This is not a maintenance role; it is an architecture role for someone who gets energized by building systems in environments that need them.

• A Team That Stays: Bistro has built its team primarily through referrals and internal growth over two decades. Many employees have stayed for years because they feel respected, supported, and proud of the work they produce together. When employees are asked what would make them leave, the answer is consistently nothing. That kind of loyalty creates a rare environment where a new leader inherits a team that already trusts the culture.

• Mission-Driven Work with Community Impact: Bistro contributed $800,000 to Pittsburgh nonprofits last year, and a significant portion of its business supports the nonprofit community. For someone who wants their operational leadership to mean something beyond margins and logistics, that mission is real and felt throughout the company.

• Off-Site Catering at the Highest Level: Bistro operates the away-team model; every venue is different, every execution is built from the ground up, and a single night can include twelve simultaneous events across the region. For a hospitality leader who thrives on complexity, precision, and the kind of problem-solving that only off-site catering demands, this is the environment where those skills matter most.

Who We’re Looking For

Someone who is…

• A hospitality operations leader with 5+ years of catering and banquet management experience, ideally with a background that includes both corporate hotel food and beverage operations and off-site catering at a meaningful scale.

• A systems architect who walks into an operation, sees the gaps between where things are and where they need to be, and starts building without waiting for perfect conditions or being told what to create.

• A calm, composed presence under pressure who treats last-minute changes, staffing gaps, and venue surprises as expected operational variables rather than disruptions and whose steadiness stabilizes everyone around them.

• A profitability-minded operator who understands event-level unit economics, labor cost percentages, and staffing efficiency, and who can partner with finance leadership on budgeting and forecasting without losing sight of execution quality.

• A team developer who builds high-performing event teams through structured onboarding, clear brand standards, and consistent accountability, not through personal heroics or being present for every event themselves.

• A collaborative communicator who keeps the leadership team, sales team, culinary team, and operational partners in sync through proactive, timely, and structured communication, understanding that in a synchronized operation, what they know directly affects what everyone else can execute.

Sound Like a Fit? Let’s Talk.

Reach out today and tell us about the operations you’ve built, the teams you’ve led, and the events where everything had to go right — and did. We’re looking for a leader who knows what it takes to run hospitality at scale and is ready to build the systems that carry a growing company to its next chapter.