Restaurant Innovation Network Architect
McDonald’s is proud to be one of the most recognized brands in the world, with restaurants in over 100 countries and billions of customers served each year. As the global leader in the food service industry, we have a legacy of innovation and hard work that continues to drive us. Today, we are growing with velocity and are focused on modernizing our experiences, not to make a different McDonald’s but to build a better McDonald’s.
We are a people business just as much as we are a restaurant business. We strive to be the most inclusive brand on the planet by building diverse teams who create delicious, feel good moments that are easy for everyone to enjoy. Joining McDonald's means thinking big on a daily basis and preparing for a career that can have impact around the world.
We are dedicated to using our scale for good: good for people, our industry and the planet. From bold recycling initiatives and sustainable sourcing efforts to our partnership with Ronald McDonald House Charities, we see every day as a chance to have a genuine impact on our customers, our people and our partners.
McDonald's operates 37,000+ restaurants across 120+ countries. Technology deployment into our vast system is complex and lengthy. As McDonald’s continues to innovate and disrupt the restaurant industry, we are looking to add an experienced Network Architect who will lead network architecture across McDonald’s network landscape, focusing on the Restaurant Innovation portfolio.
In this role, you will partner with application stakeholders, solutions architects, network service managers and market IT leads to define requirements, develop strategy and design network infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the business.
This position will be based out of our headquarters in Chicago, with some time spent at our Innovation Center in Romeoville, IL.
Required Skills:
· B.S/B.A degree Computer related technology or other with 5+ years of equivalent professional experience
· CCNP/CCDP or equivalent certification is REQUIRED
· 3+ years’ experience in an enterprise network design/architect role gained in large global organizations
· 2+ years of professional experience in the majority of the following technical network background areas: data center networking, VPN, SD-WAN, MPLS, Cisco Routing & Switching, WAN optimization, Load Balancers, Global Traffic Manager, Cisco on premise and Meraki LAN & WLAN, high availability campus and WAN design architecture
Desired Skills:
· Demonstrated experience in Retail technology
· Motivation to use initiative to make an immediate impact in a fast paced and dynamic environment.
· Ability to think globally and strategically, to inspire change in a complex global organization.
· Ability to drive process improvements and translate into solutions.
· Superb communication, presentation and interpersonal skills, with the ability to convey complex ideas in easy to understand business friendly language.
· A customer-focused approach to liaise with internal customers (both IT and non-IT) through regular business engagements and service issues.
· A tried teammate with a willingness to learn, engage and establish relationships with both internal colleagues and external partners.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
We are looking for someone who is passionate about:
· Working with people across a global organization
· Evolving and modernizing technologies and services to align with business priorities
· Leading innovation linked to business benefits
· Capturing and understanding business/technical IT infrastructure requirements
· Interacting with and influencing our IT partners
· Serving as a technical domain expert
Responsibilities:
· Lead the network architecture activities in our Restaurant Innovation portfolio, including: WAN, LAN and Wireless
· Partner with technical, and solution architects to ensure McDonald’s has a comprehensive architecture to support modern restaurants, including: Restaurant network reliability and scalability, Public and Private Cloud dependencies, Security constraints, IoT criticality and Data, AI, ML, NLP, Automation and more
· Understand McDonald’s current restaurant landscape of tools, processes, standards, automation, monitoring, hardware and more
· Lead assessments and vendor selection in order to develop and deploy cutting edge technical solutions, spanning beyond traditional technology into areas such as kitchen equipment automation
· Support the development of our network strategy and roadmap in partnership with other architects and service managers.
· Help create and enhance operational procedures
· Partner with internal application stakeholders, solutions architects, network service managers and market IT leads to define requirements, develop strategy and design network infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the business
· Define, document and communicate network standards and best practices for market and corporate customers
· Provide network expertise and leadership to the business and IT functions
· Create and maintain strong relationships with corporate and market teams to ensure strong and effective engagement in technology discussions
· Gain an understanding of the varied market (country) architecture and support network standardization efforts
· Participate in Architecture Review Boards, representing Global Networking