Director, People Experience, Technology & AI Transformation

At Fogo de Chão, we strive to give our guests an unforgettable dining experience of discovery while showcasing the Culinary Art of Churrasco. Our mission is to ignite fire and joy to care for our team, our guests, and our communities.

We believe better futures start when we bring our best to the table every day to Feed a Purposeful Future – starting with our team members. We feed our teams with fulfilling job opportunities, making space around the table so everyone feels welcome. At Fogo, we’ll provide you with a fulfilling career with professional and personal growth opportunities at every level. Our values of teamwork, integrity, excellence, humility, and Deixa Comigo (we’ve got you!) are more than just words, it’s how we do things every day.

We are hiring a Director, People Experience, Technology, & AI Transformation to simplify how HR work gets done, leverage automation and AI responsibly, and build people technology that enables leaders to focus on developing teams and delivering exceptional Guest Experiences.

This individual contributor role operates as a department of one with broad enterprise influence across HR, Operations, IT, Enterprise Data & Analytics, Finance, Legal/Compliance, vendors, and field leadership.

The ideal candidate brings deep HR domain expertise, technology fluency, AI curiosity, change enablement capability, and the discipline to translate people needs into scalable, data-informed products, workflows, and adoption plans.

What You Will Own

Simplify Work to Elevate Hospitality

• Redesign HR processes to enable connection, recognition, and high standards.
• Eliminate redundant approvals, manual data entry, and low-impact reporting.
• Ensure solutions increase time spent with Guests and Teams.
• Scope current-state HR processes and workflows to identify friction points, manual workarounds, duplication, and areas prone to human error; use findings to design simplified, future-state workflows that are scalable, intuitive, and adoption-ready.

Eliminate Low-Value Work at Scale

• Conduct time studies across Above Restaurant Operations Leadership, Restaurant Managers, and HRBPs
• Identify top operational inefficiencies
• Drive elimination, automation, or self-service adoption

Deploy Practical AI & Workforce Technology

• Implement high-impact use cases:
  • Hourly “human in the loop” hiring automation
  • Automated onboarding workflows
  • Team Member self-service
  • Manager support/coaching tools
• Partner with IT while owning prioritization and adoption.

• Partner with HR Centers of Excellence, Operations, Enterprise Data & Analytics, and IT to translate restaurant and people pain points into AI-enabled use cases, product requirements, workflows, data requirements, integration needs, governance inputs, and adoption plans.
• Evaluate emerging people technology, automation, and AI capabilities through a practical lens for risk, usability, data quality, compliance, security, scalability, and Team Member experience.

Own the Enterprise People Technology Project Map

• Own and maintain the full people technology transformation project map, including active initiatives, future-state opportunities, owners, milestones, dependencies, risks, decisions needed, sequencing, resourcing assumptions, and expected value.
• Establish clear governance, intake, prioritization, status reporting, and escalation routines so leaders can make informed tradeoffs, and the work remains aligned, visible, and actionable.
• Translate a complex roadmap into simple executive updates, field-ready communications, vendor priorities, and cross-functional action plans.

Productize HR Programs

• Consult with HR leaders and cross-functional partners to simplify performance, engagement, and development programs so they are scalable, practical, and easy for restaurant teams to adopt.
• Minimize and/or eliminate corporate-heavy processes that do not translate to restaurants.

Drive Adoption Through Trust and Simplicity

• Partner with Above Restaurant Operations Leadership and General Managers.
• Pilot, refine, and scale solutions.
• Address resistance to change and inconsistency by leaning into the ADKAR model

• Build change enablement plans that include stakeholder alignment, communications, training, behavior reinforcement, adoption measurement, and field feedback loops.
• Serve as a credible translator across HR, Operations, IT, Enterprise Data & Analytics, vendors, and Restaurant Leaders so solutions are technically sound, data-informed, operationally simple, secure, scalable, and human-centered.

What You Bring

Experience

• 8–12+ years in HR transfo