Director, Integration Platform Engineering T500-23283

Position: Director, Integration Platform Engineering [T500-23283]
About McDonald’s:
One of the world’s largest employers with locations in more than 100 countries, McDonald’s Corporation has corporate opportunities in Hyderabad. Our global offices serve as dynamic innovation and operations hubs, designed to expand McDonald's global talent base and in-house expertise. Our new office in Hyderabad will bring together knowledge across business, technology, analytics, and AI, accelerating our ability to deliver impactful solutions for the business and our customers across the globe.

Department Overview:
The Integration Platform team is responsible for the vision, strategy, and execution of the company’s enterprise integration ecosystem. The team architects and operates the central “data highway,” enabling reliable, secure, and real-time data exchange across enterprise systems.
By delivering a scalable, API-first, event-driven, and increasingly AI-enabled integration platform, the team empowers product and engineering organizations to accelerate delivery, enable AI-driven use cases, and drive business innovation at scale.

Roles and Responsibilities:

As Director, Platform Engineering - Integration Platform, you will own the technical direction and organizational leadership of the enterprise Integration Platform, spanning API management, real-time event streaming (Kafka), and cloud-native integration services across clouds.
This role is intentionally 50% hands-on technical leadership and 50% people, strategy, and execution leadership. You will remain deeply engaged in architecture, design reviews, and complex problem-solving, while also leading teams, shaping roadmaps, and aligning platform outcomes to business priorities.

Technical Leadership (~50%)
Serve as the hands-on technical authority for the enterprise Integration Platform, including:
Organizational & Strategic Leadership (~50%)

Qualifications:

Required:

API and AI service management.
Real-time, event-driven streaming (Kafka).
Cloud-native integration and data movement services.
Define and evolve the architecture and reference patterns for integration across API, streaming, and batch paradigms, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and cost efficiency.
Lead and participate in architecture and design reviews for complex, cross-domain integration initiatives, setting standards for contracts, schemas, versioning, idempotency, and error handling.
Drive adoption of modern platform engineering practices, including infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, and automated recovery.
Champion operational excellence and reliability engineering, defining SLOs / SLAs, observability standards, and incident response patterns across the integration ecosystem.
Leverage Agentic AI workflows to improve platform operations, including automated remediation, predictive insights, and proactive risk detection.
Define and execute the strategic vision, roadmap, and investment priorities for the Integration Platform, balancing innovation, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Lead, mentor, and grow multiple high-performing engineering teams, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Partner with executive leadership, product managers, enterprise architects, and security teams to ensure platform capabilities align with business strategy and enterprise architecture.
Establish and enforce platform governance, including security, data governance, and compliance standards across APIs, streaming, and integration services.
Own the platform’s financial performance, driving Fin Ops practices, cost transparency, and year-over-year cloud cost optimization.
Hire, develop, and mentor senior engineers and engineering leaders, building clear technical and leadership growth paths.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
12-15+ years of software or platform engineering experience, including leading teams.
Proven experience designing, building, and operating enterprise-scale integration platforms, using API-first and event-driven architectures.

Deep hands-on expertise with:
Preferred:
API management platforms (e.g. Apigee, Gravitee or similar).
Event streaming technologies (Kafka / Confluent).
Cloud-native platforms, preferably GCP.
Dev Ops and IaC practices (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD).
Demonstrated ability to remain technically hands-on while leading teams and setting strategic direction.
Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence executive leaders and cross-functional partners.
Experience operating global, multi-region integration platforms with high availability and regulatory considerations.
Strong understanding of Fin Ops and cloud cost optimization at platform scale.
Experience leading platform modernization or large-scale digital transformation initiatives.
Exposure to AI-enabled operations or intelligent automation in platform or infrastructure environments.