Cloud Architect Platform Engineering

The Restaurant Technology portfolio is the set of restaurant and business applications that power day-to-day operations across our restaurants and the business behind them. You will architect the cloud and platform foundation that these applications run on today and as the portfolio modernizes, with a focus on reliability, performance, and security for systems that restaurants depend on every hour they are open.

The Digital Engineering portfolio is made up of our customer-facing Whataburger digital applications, including:

• The Whataburger mobile app (iOS and Android)
• Loyalty
• Other applications and services that sit under the digital portfolio

These applications are built, or will be built, on top of the infrastructure and platform you will design and architect.

• Lead architecture and design conversations for the RTC and OXP/Digital portfolios with engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders.
• Design cloud-native reference architectures on Azure and GCP using containers, managed Kubernetes (AKS, GKE), serverless, and managed data and messaging services.
• Architect and guide the build of active-active, multi-region platforms, including global traffic management, data replication, failover, and resiliency patterns that meet defined RTO/RPO and SLO targets for mobile app, web, loyalty, and restaurant-facing systems.
• Run architecture reviews and design authority checkpoints, and drive tradeoff decisions across cost, performance, resilience, security, and portability between Azure and GCP.

• Design and evolve the internal developer platform: self-service provisioning, golden paths, service templates, and a developer portal (e.g., Backstage) used by RTC and Digital application teams.
• Define multi-tenant Kubernetes platform standards, including cluster topology, networking, ingress, service mesh, secrets management, and workload identity.
• Build the platform as a product: set a roadmap, gather feedback from engineering teams, and measure adoption and developer productivity.
• Provide build oversight to ensure delivery teams follow architectural standards and platform best practices.

• Define and evolve the next-generation CI/CD strategy: pipeline standards, release patterns (blue/green, canary, progressive delivery), and environment promotion models.
• Design and oversee reusable pipeline frameworks and templates across Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions, Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy, or equivalent tooling.
• Embed automated quality, security (Dev Sec Ops ), supply chain controls, and policy-as-code gates (e.g., Azure Policy, GCP Organization Policy, OPA/Gatekeeper) into pipelines.

• Establish IaC standards and modular patterns (Terraform preferred; Bicep and Crossplane or equivalent as needed) with strong governance, testing, and drift detection.
• Champion Git Ops (Argo CD, Flux) and automation-first practices across provisioning, configuration, and operations.
• Design landing zones and multi-subscription / multi-project structures with consistent guardrails for identity, networking, and security.

• Partner with SRE to embed reliability into the platform: SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, observability (Open Telemetry-based), alerting, and incident response practices. Help building the best-in-class SRE Dashboards both from business and Technology standpoint to view everything in single-pane of glass.
• Design resilience testing, including chaos engineering and failover exercises, and contribute to DR/BCP planning and operational readiness for production launches.
• Build reliability and operability standards into golden paths so every application inherits them by default.

• Apply AI and GenAI tooling to accelerate architecture, IaC and pipeline authoring, code review, incident analysis, and operational insights.
• Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted platform and SRE capabilities (e.g., intelligent pipeline optimization, anomaly detection and AIOps, automated documentation, self-service assistants) with appropriate guardrails.
• Design the cloud foundation for AI workloads using Azure AI / Azure OpenAI and GCP Vertex AI where programs require it.

• Partner with security and Fin Ops to build identity, data protection, compliance, and cost optimization into every design.

• [8–12 ] years in cloud,…