Principal Architect

McDonald's evolving Accelerating the Arches growth strategy puts our customers and people first and demonstrates our competitive advantages to strengthen our brand. We are recognized on lists like Fortune’s Most Admired Companies and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.

Doubling Down on the 4Ds (Delivery, Digital, Drive Thru, and Development)

Our growth pillars emphasize the critical role technology plays as the best-in-class, global omni-channel restaurant brand. Technology enables the organization through digital technologies, and improving the customer, crew and employee experience each and every day

Global Technology forging the way

Leading the digitization of our business is the Technology organization made up of innovation specialists who build industry defining tech using the latest innovations and platforms, like AI and edge computing to deliver on the next set of groundbreaking opportunities for the business. We take on technology innovation challenges at an incredible scale, and work across global teams who are always hungry for a challenge This provides access to compelling career paths for technologists. It’s bonus points when you get to see your family and friends use the tech you build at their favorite McD restaurant.

The McDonald's Global Architecture team is responsible for the architecture, design, integration, and management strategy of McDonald's digital and restaurant landscape. These systems power one of the most significant brands in the world, enabling and scaling to over 38,000 McDonald’s restaurants operating in over 120 diversified countries. Furthermore, these software platforms provide the foundation to achieve operational excellence and to reliably serve some of the world’s favorite food to a base of over 70 million customers every day leveraging a variety of channels to place your order.

We need a collaborative and self-directed individual who, in partnership with other Architects, will engage customers and stakeholders to clarify expectations, apply relevant standards and best-practices, and drive the delivery of infrastructure solutions and services. This will be a collaborative role, necessitating strong interpersonal and influencing skills in addition to broad IT domain knowledge, particularly in retail / restaurant, cloud native design (hyperconvergence), and Architecture Governance practices.

The role will have influence and oversight over restaurant application designs and restaurant transformation initiatives to ensure consistency of product and integration best practices.

Accountabilities & Responsibilities

• Partner with our restaurant platform, product and engineering teams to review architecture, solution designs and drive alignment on a Platform and Application North Star.
• Review, corrections, and approvals of application and solution blueprints of McDonald’s customer and restaurant facing products and capabilities as well as PaaS/SaaS solutions provided by vendors.
• Assess the current state of customer and restaurant facing technology and create a “North Star” blueprint with the architecture team to guide future state developments.
• Translate the technical roadmap to senior business leadership to help them better understand how technology will impact their business objectives.
• Set architecture standards for customer and restaurant facing technologies and help to create accelerators and enablement tools where needed. (SDKs, libraries, cross product tooling and platforms).
• Oversee technology consulting vendors and ensure they are following all architectural standards and meeting all KPI’s set forth by the Architecture team.
• Develop critical architecture standards and ensure there is an effective balance of centralized and decentralized standards.
• Conduct compliance reviews and provide course correction when necessary.
• Design and develop innovation POCs and fast fail concepts for product teams to develop.
• Triages technology proposals against existing infrastructure standards and best practices, and leads subsequent solution and variance activities.
• Analyzes new solution requests, solicits and clarifies nonfunctional requirements, and formulates conceptual and physical architectures, to rapidly deliver solutions in a fast paced, multi-vendor, cloud-first environment.
• Helping teams to develop the product on time, on budget and ensuring that it solves the problem it was designed to solve.

Qualifications

• 12+ years’ experience in design, implementation and/or consulting of distributed applications.
• Proven record to lead and deliver architecture solution designs for multiple parallel initiatives and projects, across applications and platforms.
• Proven ability to lead IT infrastructure / platform and (cloud) technology development projects and ensure objectives, goals and commitments are met.
• Strong analytical, planning and organizational skills with the ability to manage competing demands. The solution architect must recognize the corporate strategy and all business processes but also understand technical specifications.
• Demonstrated excellent oral and written communications skills and experience interacting with business and IT stakeholders at all levels including the executive level. An experienced solution architect should be able to listen, advise, empathize and explain.
• Ability to focus on details while maintaining the “big picture” view.
• Experience of working in a fast-paced environment with continual demands and changing priorities.
• Strong, confident, self-motivated and willing to take ownership and accountability to establish and maintain high level of customer trust and confidence.
• Demonstrated experience of delivering solutions in conjunction with 3rd party suppliers and offshore resources.
• Knowledge on integration with CI/CD pipelines and test automation.
• Deep experience with persistence architecture, scalability, performance and tuning techniques.
• Strong experience with containers (Docker, Kubernetes), configuration management systems, CI build tools, logging and monitoring tools.
• Experience with retail and eCommerce technology is preferred.

Technical Knowledge & Skills

• Familiar with Corporate, Industry and Professional Standards.
• Experience migrating or transforming legacy solutions to cloud ready platforms.
• IT Infrastructure / Platform and Cloud native development.
• Virtualization, Containerization.
• Container Management Systems.
• Event Messaging Systems.
• Observability Systems (Performance-, Telemetry).
• HA Platform Designs.
• Cloud-, Hybrid-, Hyperconvergence Environments.
• Development / Engineering and Software Architecture design.
• Cloud architecture, machine learning.
• DevOps, CI/CD management.
• Performance Monitoring.
• Test Automation.
• Security.

Additional Information

McDonald’s is an equal opportunity employer committed to the diversity of our workforce. We promote an inclusive work environment that creates feel-good moments for everyone. McDonald’s provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities as part of the application or hiring process or to perform the essential functions of their job. If you need assistance accessing or reading this job posting or otherwise feel you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process, please contact mcdhrbenefits@us.mcd.com. Reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

McDonald’s provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (including pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin, age, disability status, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, protected military or veteran status, citizenship status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Nothing in this job posting or description should be construed as an offer or guarantee of employment.