Cloud Platform Engineer III, Event Streaming

Company Description

McDonalds serves more than 70 million customers each day across over 100 countries. As part of our Accelerating the Arches strategy, we are building the data and platform infrastructure to power the next generation of customer experiences, operational intelligence, and restaurant innovation. The Enterprise Data, Analytics, and AI (EDAA) organization provides the foundation for this transformation, offering scalable, secure, and intelligent data capabilities. The Integration Platform team delivers real-time connectivity between systems, enabling fast, reliable, and compliant data movement across the McDonalds technology ecosystem.

The Opportunity

As a Platform Engineer III, you will play a key role in designing, operating, and evolving the real-time streaming platform that supports McDonalds U.S. and global operations. You will work hands-on with Confluent Cloud, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and Amazon MSK , ensuring the platform is scalable, observable, and reliable for business-critical, high-volume workloads.

This role is ideal for experienced platform engineers who enjoy owning production systems , mentoring others, and partnering with global teams to deliver resilient, event-driven capabilities across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

Qualifications

• Design, implement, and operate cloud-native real-time streaming platforms using Confluent Cloud, GCP Pub/Sub, and Amazon MSK .
• Own platform reliability and scalability , including capacity planning, performance tuning, and high-availability configurations.
• Implement and enhance automation for provisioning, deployment, configuration, and monitoring of streaming infrastructure.
• Define and enforce platform standards for event schema management, compatibility, access controls, and auditability.
• Lead and contribute to observability strategy , including SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and proactive monitoring.
• Partner with data product teams and platform leads to onboard and support real-time use cases , ensuring consistent patterns and best practices.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis , driving corrective and preventive actions.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical documentation, runbooks, and internal standards .

Required:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 58 years of experience in platform engineering, streaming infrastructure, cloud engineering, or backend systems.
• Strong expertise in Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) principles.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka-based streaming platforms , including Confluent Cloud and/or Amazon MSK .
• Experience with cloud-native messaging services , such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub .

Deep understanding of:

McDonalds Values

• Kafka topic design, partitioning, and consumer groups
• Delivery semantics, idempotency, and fault tolerance
• Schema Registry, event schema governance, and versioning strategies
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred) and scripting (Python, Bash).
• Experience operating and supporting production systems in GCP and/or AWS environments.

At McDonalds, our values shape everything we do:

Equal Opportunity Statement

McDonalds is committed to building an inclusive and accessible workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and make all employment decisions based on qualifications and business needs. We provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.

• Serve: We put our customers and people first.
• Inclusion: We open our doors to everyone.
• Integrity: We do the right thing.
• Community: We are good neighbors.
• Family: We get better together.