Principal Architect

Company Description

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.

Job Description

The McDonald's Global Solution 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.

As a Principal Solutions Architect, you will be responsible for designing and overseeing the implementation of cutting-edge customer technology solutions. You'll collaborate with cross-functional teams to define technical strategies that align with business goals, integrate customer technology stacks, and drive digital transformation efforts within the customer tech domain.

We need a collaborative and self-directed individual who, in partnership with engineering teams and business stakeholders, will drive the solutions implementation and deployment. 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.

Accountabilities & Responsibilities:

Solution Design & Architecture:

• Develop and lead the architectural vision for the customer technology landscape, ensuring scalable, secure, and robust solutions.
• Define and implement end-to-end solutions that align with the company’s business and technology strategy.
• Architect integration strategies for various systems (e.g., CRM, CMS, analytics, automation, DMP, CDP, and social media platforms).
• 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.
• Analyze new solution requests, solicit and clarify nonfunctional requirements, and formulate conceptual and physical architectures to rapidly deliver solutions in a fast-paced, multi-vendor, cloud-first environment.
• 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).

Technical Leadership & Strategy:

• Act as a thought leader in marketing technology, staying updated with trends and emerging technologies to drive innovation.
• Partner with our restaurant platform, product and engineering teams to review architecture, solution designs and drive alignment on an Application North Star.
• Help teams to develop the product on time, on budget and ensuring that it solves the problem it was designed to solve.
• Provide architectural guidance, governance, and best practices for technology implementation.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to ensure seamless and optimized technical solutions.
• Oversee technology consulting vendors and ensure they are following all architectural standards and meeting all KPIs set forth by the Architecture team.
• Identify opportunities to optimize existing MarTech infrastructure, reducing costs and improving system performance.
• Establish monitoring tools and KPIs to measure system effectiveness and user satisfaction.

Qualifications:

• 12+ years’ experience in design, implementation and/or consulting of highly scalable applications, preferably on Martech.
• Proven record to lead and deliver architecture solution designs for multiple parallel initiatives and projects, across applications and platforms.
• Strong analytical, planning and organizational skills with the ability to manage competing demands.
• Demonstrated excellent oral and written communications skills and experience interacting with business and IT stakeholders at all levels including the executive level.
• 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:

This position offers health and welfare benefits, a 401(k) plan, adoption assistance program, educational assistance program, flexible ways of working, and time off policies (including sick leave, parental leave, and vacation/PTO). Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on job classification and length of employment.

This position is eligible for a bonus, calculated based on individual and company performance.

This position is eligible for stock or other equity grants pursuant to McDonald’s long-term incentive plan.

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.

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