Head of Operations & F&B; | Elevate Hostels | New Delhi

ABOUT ELEVATE HOSTELS

Elevate Hostels is a premium student housing and co-living brand with modern, fully managed residences across New Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Dehradun and Bengaluru.

We were built with one simple goal: to make student living feel like home. We know the challenges of crowded hostels and PGs that lack comfort and warmth, so we built something better. Our residences are thoughtfully designed spaces where students can thrive both academically and socially.

Every residence comes with an all-inclusive offering:

- Spacious, fully furnished rooms with smart design and premium interiors
- Four wholesome, home-style meals a day
- Daily housekeeping and maintenance
- 24x7 safety and security
- Dedicated community managers
- Community spaces, gyms and amenities that support both study and downtime

We offer one simple price with no hidden costs. Our promise is a home away from home.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Head of Operations & F&B; to own every property, every bed, every meal and every resident touchpoint across our portfolio.

This is not a role for someone who manages a property. It is for someone who can run an entire portfolio and build the systems, teams and technology that make every residence perform like our best one.

Mission: deliver hotel-grade, consistent resident experience at hostel-level economics. That means high occupancy, great food, low cost per bed and zero safety incidents, with technology and AI making every new property operate like the best one from day one.

WHAT YOU WILL LEAD

- Operations across the portfolio
- Lead day-to-day operations of every residence through City, Cluster and Property Managers
- Set the operating rhythm: daily huddles, weekly cluster reviews, monthly business reviews with the founders
- Conduct unannounced property audits and close gaps against a scored checklist
- Act as the final escalation point for residents, parents, owners and safety issues, 24x7
- Food & Beverage
- Lead central and property kitchens serving four meals a day to every resident
- Own menu engineering, recipe standardisation and costing, portion control and procurement
- Hold food cost per resident per day within budget while raising food satisfaction scores
- Cut wastage through daily meal-count forecasting and plate-waste tracking
- Hire and lead chefs, kitchen supervisors and F&B; teams




- Ensure FSSAI compliance, hygiene and food safety at every site, without exception
- SOPs, standards and quality
- Build and own the Elevate Hostels Operations Manual, covering move-ins, room readiness, housekeeping, laundry, kitchen hygiene, security and incident handling
- Define brand standards so every resident in every city gets the same experience
- Run quality assurance through mystery audits, hygiene audits and food safety checks
- Resident experience
- Own resident NPS, ratings, renewals and complaint SLAs for every property
- Design the full resident lifecycle: onboarding, mid-stay check-ins, renewal and exit
- Partner with community managers on events, academic-season support and parent communication
- Facility management
- Move maintenance from reactive to planned for DG sets, lifts, RO plants, HVAC, fire systems and CCTV
- Manage AMCs and statutory compliance, including fire NOC, lift licences, electrical safety and police verification
- Control utilities cost per bed through metering and energy-saving measures
- New property launches
- Lead operational due diligence on new buildings, covering layout, kitchen feasibility, compliance and fit-out cost
- Run the launch playbook from handover through staffing, kitchen set-up, vendors and licences to full occupancy
- Open every property on schedule and reach steady-state service within 30 days
- Technology, data and AI
- Own the ops tech stack: PMS, resident app, ticketing, attendance, access control, kitchen inventory and procurement
- Digitise every recurring process. Nothing should run on paper or WhatsApp alone
- Run the business on live dashboards for occupancy, collections, SLAs, food cost, wastage and incidents
- Drive AI use cases with measurable payback, such as meal demand forecasting, an AI-assisted resident helpdesk, predictive maintenance, occupancy and renewal forecasting, smarter rostering, and sentiment analysis of resident feedback
- Work with the product and tech team to build,



pilot and scale these tools, and drive adoption on the ground
- People, vendors and P&L;
- Build and lead a team of 150+ across operations and F&B;, both in-house and outsourced
- Create training programmes and career paths that reduce frontline attrition
- Negotiate and consolidate vendors for scale pricing
- Own the operations and F&B; budget, opex per bed, food cost and property-level EBITDA

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

10 to 12 years of experience, with a proven record of leading operations and F&B; across multiple properties at the same time. We welcome two backgrounds:

Core hospitality: hotels, serviced apartments, hostels or co-living, in an Area, Cluster or Regional Operations role, with hands-on F&B; leadership and PMS experience.

Core facility management: integrated FM across multi-site portfolios such as townships, campuses, hostels or corporate parks, with exposure to food services or institutional catering and CAFM or helpdesk systems.

Non-negotiables:

- You have run many properties at once, not a single flagship
- You have led both operations and F&B; teams at scale
- You are genuinely tech-savvy. You have rolled out and run on PMS, CAFM, ticketing or ERP systems, and you think in dashboards
- You understand AI and how it applies to operations. You do not need to code, but you can spot use cases, work with tech teams and drive adoption
- You have owned a P&L; or budget and can show cost savings in numbers
- You have opened or taken over new properties and brought them to steady state
- You are hands-on. You walk kitchens, floors and plant rooms, not just review reports

Strong advantage: student housing, hostel or co-living experience; a hotel management or engineering background; having built processes from zero in a scaling company.

Location: Current Delhi, with travel across cities

Reports to: Founder / CEO

HOW TO APPLY

If you have run operations and F&B; across a portfolio, you believe technology and AI will define the next generation of hospitality, and you want to build the benchmark for student living in India, we want to hear from you.

Send your profile to [your email] or message me directly. Referrals are welcome.

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📌 Head of Operations (Pan India) (Delhi)
🏢 Elevate Hostels
📍 Delhi