Senior Project Manager, Construction Phase

Job Description

COCOZZA is the restaurant construction company built to solve the biggest problem in the industry: most restaurants fail before they ever open. They fail because operators sign leases without knowing what their build will cost, and the traditional process makes them wait until the drawings are finished to find out. Our proprietary Budget/Lease/Design/Build process fixes that. We join the project as part of the design team from day one and put a real budget in the operator’s hands before they sign their lease. That budget sharpens at every stage of design and lands at a fixed price the operator can trust. We believe it is the most reliable, efficient and operator-focused way to build restaurants in New York City, and we hire people who want to master it.

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We build restaurants and bars across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and we build them the way great hospitality teams operate: with clarity, preparation and genuine care. We take ownership early, eliminate surprises, and protect the capital and timeline of every operator we serve. From our NoMad office, project teams, architects and clients collaborate inside a proven system: modern software, upstream planning, one method from concept through opening in the best restaurant city in the world. Everything we promised in design gets proven in your phase.

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The Role

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You are in charge of executing the construction phase of every project being run by your project managers.

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A Project Manager carries their project from the first design meeting to opening night. You don’t take that from them. What you own is how the construction phase runs on every project in the company at once: the same sequence, the same cadence, the same standard, on every site.

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Once a project mobilizes, its Project Manager works for you. Before that, they work with your design phase counterpart. A Project Manager running two projects at different stages is working for both of you at the same time, one project each. That only holds together if the two of you run one standard rather than two, which is the whole point of splitting the seat.

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The construction phase is a sequence and a heartbeat, and you run both. The sequence is unforgiving and it only runs one direction: mobilize, lay out, coordinate the construction drawings, price and close the finishes amendment, then inspect, photograph, close the walls, inspect, close the ceilings, land the critical path events that other people control, land the critical finish events that arrive on a truck, walk it before the client walks it, punch it, close it out and sign it off. The heartbeat is the week: the pod meeting that rehearses the client meeting, the quality control walkthrough you run with the Project Manager before anyone shows a client anything, the client meeting, minutes within a day, and the pod prep session that works schedule, change orders, files, purchasing and submittals.

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Two things in that sequence decide whether a restaurant opens on time, and neither is fully in our control. Gas authorization and utility service run on someone else’s clock, and long lead items run on a factory’s. Both live on your schedule from the day we mobilize, not from the day they become a problem. An operator with a lease, a payroll and an announced opening date is not in a position to absorb a surprise, and managing that honestly is most of what senior means here.

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You report to our Principal and work daily with our Project Managers and their assistants, our trade partners, our inspectors and our operators. Our Managing Director reads the reports JobTread produces on your projects and coaches you to them.

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What You’ll Own

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1. The sequence. Every site moving in order: inspections passed and photographed before walls close, ceilings closed on verified work, nothing buried that we can’t prove.
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2. The critical path. Gas, solid fuel, utility services and long lead items tracked from mobilization, on our schedule rather than on someone else’s promise, with the operator told the truth every week.
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3. The quality. The weekly walkthrough, the internal pre-punch walk before a client ever sees the room, the punch list driven to zero, closeout and sign off.
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4. The money in the field. The finishes amendment priced and closed, trade change orders reviewed weekly, percent complete honest, and the record clean enough that every change we captured gets paid.
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5. The people. Project Managers and assistants coached inside live construction work, and site habits built to the same standard on every job.
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What You’ll Do

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• Run the weekly rhythm on every project in construction. The pod meeting rehearses the client meeting and reviews the critical path. The agenda goes out before the meeting. The minutes go out within a day. The pod prep session works the schedule, change orders, files, purchasing and submittals in the office.
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• Run the quality control walkthrough with the Project Manager before the client meeting, every week. We find it first.
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• Sit the client meeting alongside the Project Manager and our Principal, and run the immediate internal review the moment it ends.
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• Receive each project from the Design Phase Senior Project Manager in a working session: what’s bought, what’s assumed, what’s still open, and what they’d watch. Then own it.
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• Own mobilization and layout, and coordinate the construction drawings against what was actually bought.
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• Run the finishes amendment through its rounds: scope walkdown, internal and client scope reviews, internal and client budget reviews, and the updated finishes schedule that comes out of it.
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• Own inspections across the book. Know what each one requires, have the site staged for it, pass it, photograph the work, and only then close the wall. Nothing closes on unverified work.
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• Own the critical path events that other organizations control. Gas, solid fuel and utility services get worked from mobilization, with the sequence, the filings and the follow-up owned here rather than hoped for.
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• Sequence the critical finish events. Millwork, banquettes and the long lead items that decide whether the last three weeks are calm or not.
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• Keep three schedules honest: the weekly schedule built from the budget including long leads, the critical path version the client sees, and the two-week lookahead your Project Managers run their crews from.
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• Review trade change orders every week. Run the monthly cycle: percent complete review and all-trade coordination.
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• Hold site safety and daily logs to standard across every job, so the record is complete on the day rather than reconstructed at month end.
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• Run the internal pre-punch walkthrough, then the punch list, then closeout and sign off. The punch list is dead before it can threaten an opening.
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• Coach your Project Managers and assistants inside the work: on site, in the platform, in the moment.
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How Success Is Measured

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Two measures, reviewed weekly with the Principal. Both come out of JobTread automatically. The Managing Director reads the same reports and coaches to them.

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• The opening. Projects hand over on the date the construction schedule promised, at a quality the operator opens with confidence. When a date moves, the question is what you saw and when.
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• The rhythm. The weekly cadence complete on every project in construction, every week: pod meeting, agenda, quality walkthrough, client meeting, minutes, pod prep. It’s the leading indicator; when the rhythm holds, the openings hold.
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Two watch numbers sit behind them: change orders captured and paid rather than absorbed, and coordination failures that reached the field. The second one goes back to your design phase counterpart, and the two of you review it together.

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What Working Here Is Like

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• These are your goals. Restaurants that open on the promised date, ready for service. A cadence that never breaks on any site. Critical path events landed before they become emergencies. Every change we captured turned into a change we got paid for. Project Managers who are measurably better every quarter.
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• This is how we measure them. The two measures above, weekly, with the Principal, from the same JobTread reports the Managing Director reads. No surprises and no mystery metrics.
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• This is what we expect. No wall closes on work that hasn’t been inspected and photographed. No client sees a room we haven’t walked first. No people problem arrives as a personality complaint; bring the mechanism and the fix. And when something goes wrong, we want to hear it the day you learn it. You’ll have the owners, an administrative team and a design phase counterpart behind you to make that standard reachable across a real book of work.
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• This is how we review. Weekly with the Principal, who you work for. The Managing Director reads the JobTread reports and coaches you to what they show. Daily, you’re on your teams’ sites and inside their projects, which is the job rather than a distraction from it. Quarterly, you and your design phase counterpart build a single review for each Project Manager out of your two phase assessments, so nobody is reviewed twice or falls between you. The same written-criteria review runs for you.
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• This is how you’re paid. Your base salary is $150,000, and it works as a floor rather than a wage. On top of it you earn a share of the gross profit of every project the company builds, settled quarterly against the salary you’ve already been paid. Your share is largest on the projects where a Project Manager still needs you constantly and falls as their team matures, because this seat is paid to make people not need it. At our current size that puts total earnings around $215,000 in a full year, and it rises toward $300,000 as we add Project Managers. Your first 90 days are training, and your share starts on the work after them. The books are open: you’ll see the gross profit on every job, you’ll know your rate, and you’ll be able to work out your own number at any point in the year. The fixed price is set before you get the job, which means everything you protect in the field is margin the company keeps.
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• This is what operators should experience. A site that is visibly under control, a schedule they can plan a business around, and a senior person who tells them about a delay while there’s still time to do something about it.
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• This is how you should feel. Trusted with the half of the process the client actually watches. Backed by a design phase that hands you a real scope instead of a set of hopes, and measured on the thing this industry is worst at: opening on the day we said we would.
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What You Bring

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• Seven or more years running New York City commercial interiors construction, with restaurant or hospitality work strongly preferred, and projects taken end to end through opening.
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• You know the sequence cold and you know where it breaks. You can look at a site on a Tuesday and tell whether Friday’s inspection is going to pass.
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• You’ve run New York’s long lead approvals. Gas, utility service and occupancy filings are process to you rather than mystery, or you’ve run enough of them to learn fast and you can show us how you’d work one.
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• You read a schedule fluently. You can find the real critical path on a wall of tasks, and you know when a site is lying to its schedule.
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• You’ve managed and developed other project managers, and you can name the people you made better and where they are now.
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• You’ve held the money in the field: change orders priced and collected, percent complete you’d defend line by line.
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• You live in the software daily and you can teach it in the moment. Your corrections come with a screen open rather than a lecture.
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• You hold a high standard and trades still want your jobs. That combination is the seat.
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What's In It For You

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• All employees eligible for health insurance stipend of $600 per month to use towards plan cost
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• 401k
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• PTO + sick days
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• Compensation growth based on company gross profit sharing
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