Sr Manager, Network Product Management

McDonald's Corporation•Chicago, IL

42d•$152,678 - $190,847

About The Position

The Sr. Manager, Network Operations leads the globally distributed teams responsible for the availability, performance, and resilience of McDonald's Restaurant Network, in support of the Global Restaurant Network Transformation (GRNT). This role provides global operational authority, service governance, and operations leadership, while enabling regional and market teams to reliably run and support the global network standard. The Sr. Manager leads a globally distributed team of network operations engineers and remains effectively engaged in incident command, service health, automation strategy, and complex problem management. The role partners closely with Global Network Engineering, Product, Deployment, Security, and Regional / Market IT teams to ensure global consistency, security, scalability, and operational excellence—while allowing for controlled local flexibility where required.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in Network Operations or Engineering supporting global or multi-market environments
5+ years leading operations teams across regions or time zones
Strong hands-on experience with Juniper networking and Palo Alto security platforms or equivalent technologies
Strong understanding of network monitoring, ITIL-based incident/change management, and SLA-driven operations
Experience leading product backlogs, roadmaps, and Agile/scrum delivery, including portfolio budget ownership
Demonstrated experience managing vendors, carriers, and managed service providers
Proven success delivering network automation for scale, reliability, and consistency
Strong ability to influence and lead across regions, cultures, vendors, and operating models
Demonstrated oral/written communication skills to multiple levels of leadership, with the ability to convey complex ideas in easy-to-understand, friendly language

Nice To Haves

Relevant certifications such as ITIL, CCNP/CCIE, JNCIP or PMP
Experience operating within global standards / local execution models
Background in restaurant, retail, or branch-based global networks
Exposure to observability and AIOps for network operations

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a globally distributed team of Network Operations Engineers and senior technical resources across geographies, including workload planning and prioritization, performance management, coaching, and career development.
Establish global operations standards, operating models, and ways of working.
Build a culture of accountability, AI-driven innovation, automation-first thinking, and continuous improvement.
Lead and drive product backlogs and functional requirements with business and technology stakeholders, aligned to network operations.
Define and influence product roadmaps with recommendations on how operational functionality, workflows, and user journeys should be defined, leveraging the technology stack's capabilities.
Operate as part of a scrum team, managing backlogs and delivery in Jira and partnering with scrum teams and business analysts to map capabilities to processes.
Serve as a key point of contact for functionality and timelines.
Own portfolio finances and budget, ensuring backlogs and prioritization align with the committed budget.
Own global market onboarding into network operations for GRNT adoption — transitioning deployed markets from project delivery into steady-state run and support.
Lead operational readiness assessments — monitoring, observability, alerting, runbooks, on-call coverage, and SLA/SLO baselining — prior to production handover.
Partner with Global Network Engineering and Deployment to ensure a clean handoff into operations, with knowledge transfer and support models in place.
Ensure onboarded markets meet global operability standards while allowing controlled local flexibility where required.
Feed operational lessons learned back into onboarding playbooks, runbooks, and standards.
Own global network service health, availability, and SLA/SLO performance, ensuring uptime meets or exceeds targets.
Own the global NOC and a follow-the-sun, on-call support model, driven by observability and AIOps for proactive detection and response.
Provide leadership for incident response and escalation, including: Incident command for major and multi-market events, Change management governance and maintenance windows, Root-cause analysis and operational KPI reporting.
Govern operational exceptions, ensuring deviations are deliberate, documented, and minimized.
Partner with Global Network Engineering to lead problem management across markets.
Own engineering responses to recurring or high-impact issues.
Drive corrective actions that improve global stability, resilience, and efficiency.
Own global vendor, carrier, and managed service provider relationships, including contract and SLA negotiation, carrier and circuit management, escalations, and service reviews.
Drive performance and cost efficiency across multi-vendor ecosystems, partnering with Procurement, Finance, and Legal to align vendor strategy with global standards and budget.
Define and lead the global network operations automation strategy, focused on: Automated monitoring and self-healing, Deployment and change automation, Reduction of manual effort and error at scale.
Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to prioritize automation that delivers measurable global impact.
Maintain active technical engagement in large-scale, globally distributed environments, including service health reviews and sophisticated troubleshooting.
Provide senior technical leadership across: WAN, LAN, and SD-WAN, Network security and SASE architectures, Cloud-adjacent and edge networking.