Sr Manager, Engineering Tech Lead

Department Overview

The Senior Manager, Engineering – Conversational Commerce Core Product Innovation leads a team of engineers responsible for designing, building, and scaling the foundational capabilities that power McDonald’s next-generation digital ordering experiences. This role is critical to driving innovation, rapid iteration, and technical excellence across the Conversational Commerce platform, ensuring solutions are robust, scalable, and future-ready.

A core focus of this role is to deliver seamless, consistent, and personalized customer experiences across all channels—including drive thru, kiosk, mobile, web, and emerging platforms—by leveraging advanced AI and LLM technologies.

Company Values

At McDonald’s, our company values are at the heart of everything we do. As a leader, you are expected to:

• Serve: Put customers and crew at the center of every decision, delivering experiences that delight and inspire.
• Inclusion: Foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where every voice is valued and respected.
• Integrity: Uphold the highest standards of honesty, transparency, and ethical conduct in all actions and decisions.
• Community: Build strong relationships within our teams and with our partners, supporting the communities we serve.
• Family: Treat colleagues, partners, and customers with care, empathy, and respect, creating a sense of belonging for all.
• Growth: Champion continuous learning, innovation, and improvement—both for yourself and your team.

Duties

Product Innovation Leadership

• Lead the end-to-end development and continuous improvement of core Conversational Commerce services, with a focus on scalable architecture, AI/LLM integration, and seamless cross-channel experiences.
• Drive the technical vision and strategy for new product capabilities, collaborating with product management, UX, architecture, and infrastructure teams.
• Champion rapid prototyping, experimentation, and the adoption of emerging technologies to deliver differentiated customer and crew experiences.

AI/LLM Integration & Cross-Channel Expansion

• Architect and implement advanced AI/LLM-powered solutions that enable natural, context-aware interactions across all customer touchpoints—drive thru, kiosk, mobile, web, voice, and future platforms.
• Ensure that customer journeys are unified and personalized, regardless of channel, by building modular, extensible AI frameworks that support rapid onboarding of new experiences and markets.
• Lead the integration of large language models (LLMs) to support adaptive, multilingual, and contextually relevant interactions, driving consistency and delight across every channel.
• Develop and maintain scalable frameworks for prompt engineering, context management, and real-time orchestration of AI agents, ensuring that innovations in one channel can be leveraged across others.
• Collaborate with data science, AI, and platform teams to continuously improve model performance, reduce hallucinations, and ensure responsible AI practices.

Platform Engineering & Integration

• Oversee the design and implementation of platform services, APIs, and integration points, ensuring high performance, reliability, and extensibility.
• Lead and coordinate integration efforts for Point of Sale, Audio, Menu, and Digital Ordering systems, ensuring robust and reliable connectivity across the restaurant and digital ecosystem.
• Guide the migration from legacy protocols to modern, event-driven, and API-first architectures (e.g., GStreamer to WebSocket, Model Context Protocol).

Technical Excellence & Delivery

• Define solutions for complex integration and platform challenges, including rapid troubleshooting and deployment of workarounds in collaboration with internal and external partners.
• Oversee the development and deployment of Docker containers and CI/CD pipelines to support virtualized testing and continuous delivery.
• Implement and manage feature toggles, overlay screens, and configuration management for rapid enablement of new features.
• Ensure robust documentation, support processes, and operational readiness for all core product innovations.

Team & Stakeholder Engagement

• Build and mentor a high-performing engineering team, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as the technical liaison for integration partners and vendors, facilitating solution reviews, alignment meetings, and escalation management.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on requirements, priorities, and technical strategy.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform development, or product innovation, with progressive leadership responsibilities.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams in Agile environments.
• Deep familiarity with AI/LLM technologies, cloud platforms, and modern software architecture.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, test automation, and DevOps practices.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional leadership skills.
• Working knowledge of security best practices and compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, PCI-DSS).

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with LLMs (e.g., Gemini, Claude, Gemma, Llama), cloud AI platforms (e.g., Bedrock, Vertex), and Model Context Protocol.
• Experience with responsible AI best practices, testing generative agents, and customer-facing AI applications.
• Experience integrating with audio hardware and voice-first interfaces.
• Experience scaling AI/LLM-powered solutions across multiple digital and physical channels.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. 

Compensation

Bonus Eligible: YES

Long - Term Incentive: YES

Benefits Eligible: YES

Salary Range

The expected salary range for this role is $152,678.00 - $190,847.00 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.