Manager, Engineering - Drive Thru Orchestration Service

Overview

McDonald’s is proud to be one of the most recognized brands in the world, with restaurants in over 100 countries that serve 70 million customers daily. As the global leader in the food service industry, our legacy of innovation and hard work continues to drive us.

From drive-thru updates to delivery to mobile order and pay, we are innovating quickly and growing. Joining McDonald's means thinking big and preparing for a career that can have influence around the world.

At McDonald’s, we see every day as a chance to create a positive impact. We lead through our values centered on inclusivity, service, integrity, community, and family. From the support of Ronald McDonald House Charities to our Youth Opportunity project and sustainability initiatives, our values keep us dedicated to using our scale for good: good for our customers, people, industry, and the planet.

We also offer outstanding benefits including a sabbatical program, tuition assistance, and flexible work arrangements.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to the diversity of our crew members, staff, operators, and suppliers. We promote an inclusive work environment that creates feel-good moments for everyone. We are interested in people who enhance our company culture:
Does this role interest you? We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every single requirement!

• Orchestration Platform Leadership:
  Lead the full development and oversight of the Drive Thru Orchestration Service, ensuring high availability, reliability, and scalability across all ordering channels.
• Build and deploy a decoupled, event-driven orchestration platform that works alongside menu, cart, payment, and fulfillment services.
• Coordinate the migration from legacy, tightly coupled systems to a modern, API-first, and protocol-aligned architecture (e.g., .NET Proxy rewrite, Web Socket audio integration).
• Ensure the orchestration platform supports multi-region deployment, real-time availability checks, and robust error handling.
• Lead integration efforts with menu services (Model Context Gateway), cart management (Immutable Cart), payment, and external vendor systems.
• Define and enforce API specifications, protocol alignment, and data contracts to ensure seamless interoperability.
• Drive the adoption of event sourcing, GUID-based state management, and canonical data models to guarantee order accuracy and auditability.
• Coordinate the implementation of telemetry, monitoring, and automated rollback strategies for operational excellence.

• Team & Project Management:
  Build and mentor a high-performing engineering team, encouraging a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Manage project delivery, prioritization, and cross-functional dependencies, ensuring timely and on-budget execution.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, and platform teams to align on requirements, priorities, and technical strategy.

• External partnerships:
  Serve as the primary technical liaison for orchestration integration with external partners (e.g., Google, POS vendors, menu teams).
• Communicate technical vision, progress, and challenges to senior leadership and collaborators.

• Ensure robust testing, validation, and monitoring of orchestration flows and APIs.
• Manage incident response, troubleshooting, and continual advancement for orchestration service reliability and performance.

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform development, or orchestration systems, with progressive leadership responsibilities.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams delivering distributed services or APIs at scale.
• Strong experience with event-driven architectures, API development, and cloud-native platforms.
• Proven ability to manage complex migrations and drive architectural modernization.
• Excellent communication, collaborator management, and cross-functional leadership skills.

• Experience with drive thru, QSR, or retail orchestration platforms.
• Familiarity with event sourcing, real-time data pipelines, and AI/LLM integration.
• Bachelor’s degree or Master’s degree or equivalent experience…