Staff AI Engineer/Tech Lead
Date: Sep 25, 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.
Role Overview
In this role, you will lead AI system engineering and model development, with a focus on building advanced AI solutions that align with enterprise architecture and evolving business goals. This role balances building scalable AI infrastructure with hands-on model training, ensuring that advanced AI solutions are robust, production-ready, and aligned with enterprise architecture.
The Staff AI Engineer/Tech Lead will lead design, experimentation, and deployment of end-to-end AI systems, while fostering innovation and excellence across teams.
Primary Responsibilities
- Architect, design, and implement scalable AI systems that integrate seamlessly with enterprise platforms
- Define workflows for model lifecycle management, including training, deployment, versioning, reproducibility, monitoring, and retraining
- Optimize infrastructure for distributed training, inference latency, cost efficiency, and reliability
- Collaborate with enterprise engineering teams to ensure secure, compliant, and production-grade deployment of AI workloads
- Train, fine-tune, and evaluate models across computer vision, NLP, generative AI, and multimodal AI
- Translate research innovations into applied solutions, with focus on performance, fairness, interpretability, and business alignment
- Design benchmarking pipelines and conduct systematic experiments to identify best-fit architectures for use cases
- Build reusable model templates and components to accelerate AI adoption across domains
- Partner with product, data, and engineering teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities
- Provide technical guidance to engineers and data scientists on both systems architecture and ML best practices
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, or related field
- 8+ years of professional experience with at least 3+ years in AI/ML engineering, covering both system design and model training
- Proven expertise in enterprise AI system architecture, including distributed training, containerized deployments, and cloud/hybrid platforms
- Hands-on experience with training large-scale deep learning models for Computer Vision or Natural Language Processing, optimizing pipelines, and deploying to production
- Strong programming skills in Python; familiarity with frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or HuggingFace
- Solid understanding of MLOps practices: CI/CD for ML, monitoring, drift detection, retraining pipelines
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders across technology and business functions
- Excellent communication and documentation skills, with ability to explain complex AI systems to technical and non-technical audiences
- Passion for innovation, experimentation, and applying AI responsibly
Preferred Qualifications
- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science/AI or a related field
- 2+ years of experience in scaling AI applications
- Familiarity with Agentic AI technology
- Familiarity with edge AI deployment and hybrid cloud/on-prem infrastructure
- Experience with observability tools (model monitoring, logging, tracing)
Compensation
Bonus Eligible: YES
Long - Term Incentive: YES
Benefits Eligible: YES
Salary Range
The expected salary range for this role is $149,260.00 - $190,310.00 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.
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