Sr Manager, Solution Readiness

McDonald's Corporation•Chicago, IL

About The Position

McDonald’s is a leading global omni-channel restaurant brand, accelerating its growth strategy by focusing on Delivery, Digital, and Drive Thru. The company is at the forefront of transformative technology, utilizing AI, robotics, and emerging tech to digitize its operations and enhance customer experience globally. This role is part of the US Technology Solution Readiness team, which aims to deliver limitless technology solutions for convenient and delightful dining, enabling Crew, Managers, and Owner Operators to run great restaurants across 13,500+ US locations. The US Solution Readiness Senior Manager, focusing on Backend Capabilities, leads consumer platform technology for one of the world's largest mobile ordering and delivery platforms. This role involves managing long-term product roadmaps, supporting enhancement deployments, triaging defects, and collaborating with counterparts throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure solutions meet US requirements and align with McDonald’s Global Technology strategic goals. A global perspective is crucial for developing enterprise solutions. The Senior Manager collaborates with global tech leads, product managers, vendors, and architects on architectural, development, and functional decisions. This position also involves people leadership for solution readiness managers and business technical analysts, and ownership of implementation decisions for the Global Mobile Application, Global Web Solution, and Global Web Application. The ideal candidate should possess a strong technical skillset, be results-driven, an excellent communicator, and foster a collaborative environment. Key collaborators include US Owner Operators, Digital Customer Experience, Operations, Marketing, Global Technology, and Legal.

Requirements

8+ years of hands-on experience in backend development, technical operations, or site reliability engineering.
Previous experience as an engineer or Tech Lead, or experience working with engineering teams.
Expertise in cloud-native environments and services, with significant hands-on experience with AWS and/or GCP.
Demonstrated experience with monitoring, logging, and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Dynatrace).
Experience in crafting and executing comprehensive testing strategies for backend systems, covering functional/component, integration, and performance testing.
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive alignment and decision-making.
Strong understanding of the software development life cycle, agile methodologies, and proficient in project management principles.
Previous experience with mobile applications, ordering and payment technology, 3rd party delivery integration programs, and an understanding of their supporting business processes.
Experience leading technical priorities and driving strategic architectural initiatives.
Strong technical background in microservices architecture, APIs, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and database technologies.

Responsibilities

Influence and align the product roadmap, incorporating both US market requests and global initiatives, to ensure strategic alignment with US, Global Technology, and vendor roadmaps.
Partner with Owner-Operators on the Technology Board, as well as stakeholders in Marketing and Operations, to drive strategic alignment and ensure business needs are met.
Serve as the primary US technical liaison to Global Technology teams, actively partnering with Product Managers and Tech Leads throughout the software development lifecycle to influence backend solutions and ensure US market requirements are met.
Define and manage technical requirements, dependencies, and vendor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to guarantee business needs are achieved and solutions are secure, scalable, and reliable.
Partner with Global Architecture team to review architecture designs and blueprints prior to development to ensure solutions meet US needs and requirements.
Own and drive a comprehensive testing strategy for all backend services—including functional, integration, performance, and scalability testing—to ensure the quality, resilience, and successful deployment of all solutions.
Establish and own the processes for monitoring the health, stability, and performance of critical US backend environments, and ensure robust 24x7 operational support processes are in place.
Oversee the deployment and release management of backend services into US pre-production and production environments.
Lead the triaging and root cause analysis for production and non-production defects, coordinating with engineering and support teams to ensure timely resolution.