Washington, DC  ·  Open to travel Series B → NYSE: CAVA

Technology operations, built for scale.

From restaurant systems across nearly 500 locations to enterprise AI adoption taken from roadmap to production.

Fifteen-plus years across hospitality, retail, and government, including ten years at CAVA. I joined at Series B and left a New York Stock Exchange company, having owned the technology that opened the restaurants, kept 14,000 employees working, and turned generative AI from a pilot into something people actually used.

See selected work Get in touch
Paris Jackson
Paris Jackson
Technology Operations Leader
15 → 500
Locations supported as the footprint grew, from approximately 15 to nearly 500
14,000+
Employees supported across offices, restaurants, and manufacturing facilities
$10M+
Technology budget managed, operating and capital expenditure
~98%
Technology delivery accuracy across more than 90 new restaurant openings
~97%
Monthly SLA attainment against a 90 to 95 percent target

The arc

I joined at Series B. I left a public company.

Ten years at CAVA, from roughly 15 locations to nearly 500, through an approximately $300 million acquisition and a New York Stock Exchange listing. Different company at every stage. The technology had to keep working through all of it.

  1. 2016 Series B
    ~15 locations

    Hired to stabilize support for corporate users and restaurants. Promoted to IT Operations Lead within approximately four months.

  2. 2018 ~$300M
    acquisition

    Managed technology delivery and operational transition through the acquisition, merged the help desks into one organization, and supported acquired-brand operators outside my direct chain of authority.

  3. 2023 NYSE: CAVA
    public listing

    Designed governance structures, executive operating cadences, and performance-reporting frameworks that improved leadership visibility into technology performance.

  4. 2026 Nearly 500
    locations

    Senior Manager, Technology Strategy & Operations. Technology for more than 14,000 employees across restaurants, five offices, and three manufacturing facilities.

To be precise about my role: I did not run the deal or the offering. I ran the technology underneath a company that changed shape three times in ten years, including owning delivery and operational transition through the acquisition. Growing 30x, absorbing another brand's estate, and operating at public-company scale each break a different part of a technology organization. I have now fixed all three.

What I do

Four areas where I have real depth.

Each one is backed by work below, with the numbers attached.

01

Restaurant & Multi-Unit Systems

Point of sale, payments, back office and inventory, loyalty and gift card, kitchen display, and the configuration standards that make consolidated reporting trustworthy.

02

Service Desk & Support Operations

Tiered support models, 24/7 on-call and major-incident response, SLA and CSAT frameworks, and managed-service partners directed toward the brand's priorities.

03

Infrastructure, Buildouts & Deployments

New site delivery end to end, network modernization, structured cabling and low voltage, endpoint fleets, and technology requirements pushed upstream into construction.

04

AI Adoption & Enablement

Adoption roadmaps, company-wide agents, AI-enabled self-service, workforce training, and ROI modeling that lets finance decide what to fund next. Two of these shipped as public products.

Selected work

Ten problems, and what happened.

All from CAVA unless noted. Filter by the area you care about.

Restaurant Systems · Deployments

Opening restaurants through 30x growth

The brand went from roughly 15 locations to nearly 500 during my tenure. Opening technology had to stop being a heroic effort and start being a repeatable process.

What I did

  • Managed end-to-end technology deployment for new sites, remodels, and relocations, covering networking, low-voltage and structured cabling, telecommunications, POS and payment systems, security, endpoint management, and guest-facing systems.
  • Developed standardized operational readiness playbooks that reduced deployment variability across national expansion.
  • Led cross-functional opening planning with Construction, Facilities, Operations, Finance, and Procurement so infrastructure was live before each site opened.
~98%Accuracy for successful delivery of required technology across more than 90 new restaurant openings
75–90New builds, remodels, and conversions per year in recent years
Restaurant Systems

Enterprise POS migration, NCR to Brink

Moving a growing fleet between point-of-sale platforms without losing reporting continuity or breaking payment flow at the register.

What I did

  • Led the migration end to end: configuration mapping, hardware, payment integration, training, and store cutover.
  • Configured Brink POS and NCR Aloha directly, including menus, items, modifiers, pricing, tax, tender types, employee and job setup, and store-level configuration.
  • Set and enforced fleet-wide configuration standards so sales and labor data rolled up consistently across locations and sales channels.
  • Managed back-office, inventory, and financial reporting platforms including Crunchtime, MenuLink, Restaurant365, and Zenput, plus loyalty, gift card, and mobile ordering on Paytronix and LevelUp.
Fleet-wideConfiguration standards established for accurate consolidated reporting
Hands-onDirect platform configuration, not vendor-managed by proxy
Service Desk & Support

A support model that scaled with the footprint

I was hired to stabilize support for corporate users and restaurants, and earned promotion to IT Operations Lead within approximately four months. The model then had to survive the growth that followed.

What I did

  • Designed a scalable operating model with remote Tier 1, internal Tier 2, and expanded walk-up coverage.
  • Led 24/7 on-call operations and SEV1/SEV2 incident management, creating an OpsGenie rotation with automations that alerted on-call managers and launched Zoom triage bridges.
  • Developed escalation and vendor-response models across service desk, desktop and walk-up services, endpoints, AV, field support, procurement, and asset management.
~97%Monthly SLA attainment against a 90 to 95 percent target
~99%CSAT against a 90 percent target, and approximately 99 percent annual executive-support CSAT
~85%First-contact resolution with backlog under 10 percent
~40%Faster problem resolution, with major-incident response in approximately 2 to 24 hours
Service Desk & Support

Getting replacement hardware to restaurants faster

A register or printer down is lost revenue that hour. Waiting a week and a half for a replacement was not a support problem, it was an operations problem.

What I did

  • Restructured hardware replacement staging and shipment so devices went out pre-staged rather than being sourced on demand.
  • Delivered formal SLA enhancements for hardware replacements and established an emergency technician response standard.
  • Directed a managed-service partner of more than 30 project managers and engineers, a remote Tier 1 team of approximately 14, and approximately 10 nationwide field technicians, holding partners accountable to brand priorities rather than vendor preference.
3–12 days
→ 2–24 hrsHardware replacement staging and shipment time
4–48 hrsEmergency technician response standard
Infrastructure & Deployments

Network modernization, and the Starlink workaround

Carrier circuit lead times do not care about your opening date. A restaurant without internet cannot take payment, so connectivity became the critical path for every launch.

What I did

  • Modernized restaurant and corporate networking on Cisco Meraki, established network standards, led switch upgrades, and built infrastructure runbooks.
  • Deployed Starlink at locations where carrier lead times threatened opening dates, rather than letting the circuit dictate the launch.
  • Moved requirements upstream: secured internet specifications in real estate work letters, added speakers and cameras to construction drawings, and obtained property management pre-approval ahead of installations.
99%+Network uptime maintained across the estate
~96%Primary internet availability at restaurant turnover, against an 85 percent goal
Infrastructure · Service Desk

Integrating an approximately $300 million acquisition

The largest transaction in the company's history to that point. Two technology estates, two support organizations, and a set of operators who did not report to me and had no reason to trust a new corporate team.

What I did

  • Managed technology delivery and operational transition through an approximately $300 million restaurant acquisition.
  • Merged the help desks into a single support organization.
  • Supported acquired-brand operators who sat outside my direct chain of authority, working through influence rather than reporting lines.
~$300MAcquisition supported through technology delivery and operational transition
Two → oneHelp desks merged into a single support organization
Infrastructure & Corporate Technology

Modernizing the corporate estate

A mixed Mac and Windows environment across five offices and three manufacturing facilities, with a device fleet that had grown faster than the standards governing it.

What I did

  • Managed Jamf and Microsoft Intune side by side, including out-of-box imaging and Zscaler security remediation.
  • Led Windows 11 migration planning across thousands of enterprise endpoints and established a five-year device lifecycle plan.
  • Led the enterprise migration from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365.
  • Managed a technology budget exceeding $10 million, owned relationships and budgets for more than 20 vendors, and approved more than 5,000 invoices per month.
3,000+Devices covered by imaging, refresh, and security remediation
20+Vendor relationships and budgets owned, helping eliminate overspending and disputes
AI Projects

Generative AI from roadmap to production

Most AI programs stall in the pilot. Selecting a tool is the easy part. The hard part is getting people to use it, and proving the last thing was worth funding.

What I did

  • Developed the AI adoption roadmap and strategy, then built what it called for rather than handing it to someone else.
  • Built company-wide AI agents that help colleagues develop their own solutions instead of queueing for mine.
  • Partnered with HR to create AI-enabled employee-referral tools using Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT.
  • Led AI-focused training and enablement, including live sessions delivered to nearly 60 colleagues.
  • Measured adoption, training effectiveness, and user-experience outcomes rather than assuming uptake.
~60Colleagues trained in live AI enablement sessions
CertifiedGoogle AI Professional, with Gemini for Google Workspace in progress
AI Projects · Service Desk

Self-service that actually deflects tickets

Most internal knowledge bases are where answers go to die. People do not search them, so they open a ticket instead, and the same question gets answered a few hundred times a year.

What I did

  • Implemented an AI-enabled knowledge base and self-service portal so people could find answers in their own words instead of guessing at an article title.
  • Built automated manager approvals into the request flow, removing the human relay step that turned a two-minute approval into a two-day wait.
  • Expanded self-service coverage specifically at the repeat requests that consumed the most Tier 1 capacity.
~85%First-contact resolution with backlog held under 10 percent
DeflectedRepeat requests removed from the queue rather than answered faster
I built a working concept exploring this. See Privy ↗
AI Projects

Making the AI business case measurable

Every vendor promises transformation. Finance wants a number. Without one, AI spend gets approved on enthusiasm and renewed on inertia, and nobody can say whether the last purchase worked.

What I did

  • Built an AI investment and implementation ROI calculator for finance teams and executive leadership to prioritize investments.
  • Modeled the full picture rather than licensing alone: implementation cost, productivity gain, quality and error reduction, and revenue impact.
  • Put the model in front of decision-makers so AI proposals were compared on the same basis instead of on the strength of the pitch.
FinanceUsed by finance and executive leadership to prioritize technology investment
PublishedReleased publicly as AI ROI Compass, free to use
Use the calculator ↗

Built and shipped

Three things you can open right now.

One shipped product, one live app I founded, and one working concept exploring a problem I spent years running by hand. All three open in a browser. Click any card.

Finance tool Live

AI ROI Compass

An AI investment ROI calculator for the people who have to sign off on the spend. Built for CEOs, CFOs, and consultants who need a defensible number before the contract, not a vendor deck after it.

  • Models four dimensions: licensing and implementation cost, productivity gain, quality and error reduction, and revenue impact
  • Returns ROI percentage, payback period in months, and net benefit, with a plain-English verdict
  • Ships as both a browser calculator and an Excel workbook on identical formulas, with editable assumption cells
  • Purpose-built for AI spend rather than a generic financial model. Works offline, free to use
Open the calculator ↗ gumroad.com
Concept demo Live

Privy

A working concept for an enterprise app store with identity governance built in. Not a shipped product. It is how I would solve a problem I spent years running by hand: people need software access quickly, and the business needs to know who approved it.

  • Self-service catalog so employees request access to applications without opening a ticket
  • Automated multi-level approval workflows, removing the human relay that turns a two-minute approval into a two-day wait
  • Identity governance so access grants stay visible, attributable, and auditable
  • Built out of running Okta, OneLogin, Lumos, and Active Directory across nearly 500 locations
Open Privy ↗ privy-app-store.ai.studio
Consumer app · Founder Live

The God Box

A faith-centered practice app for releasing worries, prayers, manifestations, and gratitude into a digital God Box. My own product, from idea through launch, and the one that has nothing to do with restaurants or IT.

  • A digital repository for prayers and worries, based on the physical practice of writing something down and letting it go
  • Manifestation tracking and gratitude journaling
  • Founded, designed, and shipped independently under Parisian Elements
Open The God Box ↗ thegodbox.app

Technology

Platforms I have actually run.

Not a keyword list. These are systems I have configured, deployed, migrated, or governed.

Restaurant Systems

Brink POSNCR AlohaCrunchtimeMenuLinkRestaurant365PaytronixLevelUpZenputEnvysionKitchen display systemsPayment devicesScanners

Network & Infrastructure

Cisco MerakiStarlinkStructured cablingLow voltageTelecommunicationsCloud-managed camerasManaged service providersInfrastructure runbooks

Service Management

Jira Service ManagementFreshserviceZendeskOpsGenieITIL practicesKnowledge managementRoot-cause analysisKPIs & service levels

Endpoint & Security

JamfMicrosoft IntuneCrowdStrikeZscalerPC/Mac imagingEndpoint lifecycle

Identity, Collaboration & Automation

Active DirectoryOktaOneLoginLumosMicrosoft 365Microsoft TeamsZoomVoIPConference-room AVSlackGoogle WorkspaceSharePointPower AutomateBoomiYext

Generative AI

Microsoft 365 CopilotChatGPT EnterpriseClaudeGeminiAI agent developmentAdoption roadmapsROI modeling

About

I have spent my career on the side of technology where it either works at 11am on a Saturday or it doesn't.

I started at Apple, first as a Sales Specialist and then as a Technical Expert and Trainer, where I learned that explaining a system clearly to someone who does not care how it works is its own discipline. As a Sales Specialist I was the top salesperson, generating over $70,000 in sales and attachments per week.

From there I spent four years at USAID's Center for International Disaster Information as an Information Management Specialist, managing technology systems and public-facing information platforms that supported disaster-response and charitable-engagement initiatives. That was my first experience of technology built in service of a mission.

Then ten years at CAVA. I arrived when it was a Series B company with roughly 15 locations and left it a New York Stock Exchange company with nearly 500. I was hired to stabilize support for corporate users and restaurants and was promoted to IT Operations Lead within approximately four months. I finished as Senior Manager, Technology Strategy & Operations, having owned the technology through an approximately $300 million acquisition, a point-of-sale migration, and the arrival of generative AI as something a company actually had to have a plan for.

I also build. AI ROI Compass is published and free, and started as an internal tool because finance had no way to compare AI proposals against each other. Privy is a working concept rather than a product, built around an access-request process that ran on people forwarding emails. The God Box is entirely my own and has nothing to do with any of this. I mention them because running technology and building it are different muscles, and I would rather show you than tell you.

The through-line is not a specific platform. It is being the person who makes a distributed operation work, and who can tell a construction manager, a franchise operator, a CFO, and a vendor engineer the same true thing in four different ways.

Career

  • CAVASenior Manager, Technology Strategy & Operations · 2020–2026IT Operations Manager, Lead, Engineer · 2016–2020
  • USAID (CIDI)Information Management Specialist · 2012–2016
  • Apple, Inc.Technical Expert / Trainer · 2012–2016Sales Specialist · 2010–2012

Education & Certifications

  • BA, Telecommunications Management / Business Administration — Howard University
  • CompTIA Network+
  • Google AI Professional
  • MIT-IDSS Data Science and Machine Learning
  • Claude 101
  • In Progress: Gemini for Google Workspace

Beyond the day job

  • AI ROI Compass — AI investment ROI calculator. Open ↗
  • Privy — working concept: enterprise app store and identity governance. Open ↗
  • The God Box — founder of a faith-centered practice app. Open ↗
  • We Are ILL — Board of Directors, nonprofit

Contact

Let's talk.

I am open to technology operations, restaurant and multi-unit technology, enterprise platform, and AI adoption leadership roles. Based in Washington, DC and open to travel.

pariscjackson@gmail.com LinkedIn Download resume