Platform Engineer III

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Date: Nov 11, 2025

Location: Chicago, IL, US, 60607

Company: McDonald's Corporation

Company Description: 

McDonald’s growth strategy, Accelerating the Arches, encompasses all aspects of our business as the leading global omni-channel restaurant brand. As the consumer landscape shifts we are using our competitive advantages to further strengthen our brand. One of our core growth strategies is to Double Down on the 3Ds (Delivery, Digital and Drive Thru). McDonald’s will accelerate technology innovation so 65M+ customers a day will experience a fast, easy experience, whether at one of our 25,000 and growing Drive thrus, through McDelivery, dine-in or takeaway.  

McDonald’s Global Technology is here to power tomorrow’s feel-good moments.   

That’s why you’ll find us at the forefront of transformative technology, exploring new and innovative ways to serve our millions of customers and spread happiness one delicious Hot Fudge Sundae-dipped fry at a time. Using AI, robotics and emerging tech, we’re digitizing the Golden Arches. Combine that with our unparalleled global scale, and we’re reshaping all areas of the business, industry and every community that is home to a McDonald’s restaurant. We face complex tech challenges every day. But that’s where our diverse and talented teams come in. They’re made up of the best and brightest from all over the globe, and they thrive in the space where feel-good meets fast-paced.   

Check out the McDonald’s  Global Technology Technical Blog to learn how technology and our global team are directly enabling the Accelerating the Arches strategy.  

Department Overview

This opportunity is part of the Global Technology Infrastructure & Operations team (GTIO), where our mission is to deliver modern and relevant technology that supports the way McDonald’s works. We provide outstanding foundational technology products and services including Global Networking, Cloud, End User Computing, and IT Service Management. It’s our goal to always provide an engaging, relevant, and simple experience for our customers.

The Platform Engineer III role is part of the Edge ecosystem team in Global Technology Infrastructure & Operations. The role reports to the Director, Edge Platform Engineering and will play a critical role in building and maintaining the Edge computing platform that powers our global restaurant technology ecosystem. You will work closely with cross-functional engineering teams to design, implement, and support scalable, secure, and resilient Edge platform solutions. You will support the Digital, Data, Engineering, and Restaurant development teams by delivering a scalable, resilient, and secure platform pipelines and capabilities.

This is a great opportunity for an experienced technology leader to help craft the transformation of infrastructure and operations products and services to the entire McDonalds environment.

Accountabilities & Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, release and maintain edge platforms and infrastructure.
  • Collaborate with platform architects, engineers and suppliers to implement scalable and modular, fault tolerant edge platform deployments.
  • Optimize edge platform and underlying infrastructure for performance, reliability, and security
  • Implement strategies for failover, disaster recovery, and zero-touch provisioning at the edge.
  • Partner on hardware sizing and provisioning of system resources for edge workloads.
  • Implement and manage virtualization and/or containerized environments for edge deployments
  • Implement and manage data replication, backup, and disaster recovery strategies for edge environments.
  • Design, build and implement orchestration framework for managing VM based and containerized workloads across edge clusters.
  • Integrate Edge platform tools with GCP for hybrid workload deployments.
  • Develop CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code templates for edge environments.
  • Build reusable automation frameworks to streamline deployment and configuration.
  • Enable self-service adoption of edge platform standards across cross-functional teams.
  • Evaluate emerging edge technologies, conduct PoCs, and drive technical feasibility studies.
  • Stay current on advancements in edge computing, distributed systems, and observability.
  • Maintain documentation for edge platform designs, configurations and deployment processes
  • Participate in platform reviews and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
  • 6+ years in platform engineering or similar discipline, with 3+ years focused on edge computing or on-prem cloud.
  • 5+ years working with Cloud technologies with good knowledge of IaaS and PaaS offerings in GCP & AWS.
  • Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, and orchestration in edge or cloud environments
  • Familiarity with edge hardware infrastructure (servers, IoT devices) and performance tuning.
  • Experience with virtualization technologies (VMware ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V) and hyperconverged infrastructure.
  • Knowledge of software-defined storage systems (e.g., Ceph, Robin.io) and strategies for data replication, backup, and disaster recovery in edge environments.
  • Proficiency in programming languages: Go, Python, Rust, PowerShell.
  • Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and automation frameworks.
  • Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger).
  • Solid understanding of networking protocols, security best practices, and system performance tuning.
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and hybrid edge-cloud architectures.
  • Knowledge of CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Helm) as supporting skills.
  • Familiarity with real-time data frameworks (Apache Kafka, Flink).
  • Professional certifications in GCP, AWS, or Azure.

Compensation

Bonus Eligible: Yes

Long - Term Incentive: Yes

Benefits Eligible: Yes

Salary Range

The expected salary range for this role is $138,207 - $172,758 per year
 
The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we may also consider your experience, and other job-related factors.

Competencies

Background & Values
Building Blocks
Execution Proficiency
Strategic Proficiency
Talent Proficiency

Additional Information: 

Benefits eligible: 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.  

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

Long term Incentive eligible: 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. If you need assistance accessing or reading this job posting or otherwise feel you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process, please contact mcdhrbenefits@us.mcd.com. Reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis. 

McDonald’s provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (including pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin, age, disability status, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, protected military or veteran status, citizenship status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. 

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


Nearest Major Market: Chicago