Senior Solutions Architect

McDonald’s evolving Accelerating the Arches growth strategy puts our customers and people first, and uses 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 meaningful role technology plays as the leading, global omni-channel restaurant brand. Technology enables the organization through digital technology, 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 intrapreneurs who build industry defining tech using the latest innovations and platforms, like AI and edge computing to deliver on the next set of cutting-edge opportunities for the business. At McDonald’s you get to solve technology innovation challenges at an incredible scale, and work across global teams who are always eager for a challenge. This provides access to exciting 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
• Create and maintain blueprints of McDonald’s Restaurant applications and capabilities as well as PaaS/SaaS solutions provided by vendors.
• Assess the current state of restaurant 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 across and establish a blueprint for what restaurant backend capabilities will be needed
• 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 vendors 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
• Analyzing the technology environment
• Analyzing enterprise specifics
• Analyzing and documenting requirements
• Participation and guidance in architectural discussions

Key Relationships:

• Product Manager(s), Development Managers, Service Delivery Manager(s)
• Maintain strong global working relationships within the McD organization
• Maintain good working relationships with all suppliers
• Maintain good working relationships with all customers

Experience & Knowledge:

• 8+ years’ experience in a comparable role or in multiple IT areas in an enterprise environment
• 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

Behavioral Skills:

• Analytical Thinking and Attention to Detail
• Cross-Functional and Inter-Disciplinary Awareness
• Customer Focus
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills
• Follow-up and Monitoring
• Information Acquisition

McDonald’s is committed to providing qualified individuals with disabilities reasonable accommodations to perform the essential functions of their jobs. Additionally, if you (or another applicant of whom you are aware) require assistance accessing or reading this job posting or otherwise seek assistance in the application process, please contact recruiting.supportteam@us.mcd.com

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