Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering

The Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering is a delivery and quality-enablement leader within the Platform Resilience - Quality Pillar. This role ensures complex, cross-squad initiatives move predictably, safely, and with high quality across environments, markets, and platforms.

This role focuses on test strategy alignment, execution governance, integration sequencing, dependency management, test data readiness, and delivering a seamless user experience. It owns how change is validated across cross-functional teams, ensuring that features, initiatives, and platform capabilities comply with market and regulatory requirements, meet accessibility standards, and maintain performance benchmarks-including stability across iOS and Android platforms with respect to application crashes.

The role is responsible for managing features end-to-end, from initiation through activation across all markets, leveraging structured quality gates with a combination of automated promotions and manual certifications at each stage. This approach ensures that segment markets are protected from unstable code, allowing them to focus primarily on market-level business validations.

The role ensures delivery execution remains predictable, resilient, and quality-driven as scale and complexity increase. It requires strong ownership of quality gating, test coverage, automation strategy, and risk-based decision-making, ensuring cohesive, deployable, and production-ready outcomes rather than fragmented completion.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced quality engineering leader to help shape McDonald’s transformation. This role is based at our McDonald’s Global Headquarters in Chicago, IL.

Lead quality gating and release readiness for large-scale, customer-facing digital initiatives across mobile and web platforms, ensuring high standards of delivery, reliability, and customer experience.

Establish and enforce consistent quality standards and governance across multiple workstreams, balancing delivery speed, risk, and business impact.

Drive quality process optimization and efficient tool adoption initiatives, including regression suite audits, enhancement of testing approaches, and continuous improvement of quality metrics to reduce friction and increase reliability.

Identify systemic inefficiencies within QA processes and implement scalable, sustainable solutions that improve effectiveness, predictability, and delivery outcomes.

Design and implement scalable, extensible test automation solutions for complex consumer-facing systems, including GUI-based automation, backend automation supporting dark deployments, and end-to-end asynchronous validation across distributed platforms.

Define and promote modern automation frameworks and best practices, establishing reusable patterns and technical standards adopted across teams.

Develop and maintain hybrid automation frameworks leveraging design patterns to ensure maintainability, scalability, and long-term extensibility.

Own end-to-end test strategy and execution for Digital Channels across multiple devices, environments, and global markets, ensuring comprehensive coverage aligned with platform complexity and release timelines.

Partner with engineering, product, and QA stakeholders to align test approaches across global teams, including market/segment teams, offshore quality services, and platform QA organizations.

Drive clarity on cross-QA ownership models, eliminating duplication, closing gaps, and strengthening accountability across teams.

Manage complex, cross-functional initiatives simultaneously, prioritizing high-impact work and effectively negotiating trade-offs with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

Translate technical risks into clear business impact assessments, enabling informed and timely decision-making.

Lead launch readiness reviews and go/no-go decision forums, ensuring quality status, risk exposure, mitigation plans, and a clear "path to green" are communicated effectively.

Establish strong governance and alignment for release confidence, ensuring cross-functional stakeholders are aligned ahead of production deployments.

Conduct proactive risk analysis and mitigation planning, aligned to test strategy, scope, dependencies, and release timelines to ensure predictable delivery.

Identify critical risks early and drive cross-team corrective actions to protect timelines and quality outcomes.

Oversee Quality Services (QS) capacity, planning, and prioritization, including resource allocation, environment access readiness, and intake management across competing demands.

Reduce operational friction by removing testing blockers and streamlining dependencies across teams and environments.

Define and standardize QA processes and operating procedures (SOPs), supported by clear documentation, UML diagrams, and workflow models to enable adoption and scalability.

Promote documentation consistency and reusability, improving onboarding efficiency and operational maturity across teams.

Drive QA efficiency and continuous improvement initiatives, including regression optimization, audit frameworks, and process enhancements to improve speed, coverage, and productivity.

Foster a continuous improvement mindset, delivering measurable outcomes in release stability, defect prevention, and overall product quality.

Willingness and ability to live the McDonald’s values every day: Serve, Inclusion, Integrity, Community, and Family.

8+ years of experience in quality engineering, test leadership, release management, or cross-functional or new app testing strategy and management.

Proven experience leading quality gating, release readiness, and test execution for large-scale, customer-facing platforms.

Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, automation frameworks, and progressive delivery concepts.

Demonstrated ability to manage complex dependencies and ambiguity in fast-moving environments.

Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product, and operations.

Proven ability to work with and influence cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
Superior interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills.

Experience leading complex, cross-functional projects.
Curious and a self-starter with a strong bias for action; consistent track record of "getting things done".

Experience working on mobile apps and customer-facing digital products.
Detail-obsessed and able to meet deadlines.

Expertise in test strategy, defect prioritization, risk-based testing, and release planning.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in QSR, retail, hospitality, or large distributed systems.

Experience in Quality Engineering (QAE or SDET) roles, Quality Engineering Lead or Test Automation Lead/Architect roles.

Strong familiarity with web and mobile applications, quality engineering practices, and test/defect management tools, along with hands-on experience in CI/CD pipelines and tooling.

Proficient in one or more programming languages such as Java or Python, with strong test automation scripting expertise using frameworks like Appium, Kotlin, Selenium, and similar technologies.

Experience in device testing across physical and virtual environments, including usage of device labs, simulators, and cloud-based platforms such as BrowserStack and Perfecto.

Demonstrated experience in field testing across production store environments, validating both digital front-end experiences and backend integrations under real-world conditions.