Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering

Company Description:

McDonald’s growth strategy, Accelerating the Arches, encompasses all aspects of our business as the leading global omni-channel restaurant brand. As the consumer landscape shifts we are using our competitive advantages to further strengthen our brand. One of our core growth strategies is to Double Down on the 3Ds (Delivery, Digital and Drive Thru). McDonald’s will accelerate technology innovation so 65M+ customers a day will experience a fast, easy experience, whether at one of our 25,000 and growing Drive thrus, through McDelivery, dine-in or takeaway.

McDonald’s Global Technology is here to power tomorrow’s feel-good moments.

That’s why you’ll find us at the forefront of transformative technology, exploring new and innovative ways to serve our millions of customers and spread happiness one delicious Hot Fudge Sundae-dipped fry at a time. Using AI, robotics and emerging tech, we’re digitizing the Golden Arches. Combine that with our unparalleled global scale, and we’re reshaping all areas of the business, industry and every community that is home to a McDonald’s restaurant. We face complex tech challenges every day. But that’s where our diverse and talented teams come in. They’re made up of the best and brightest from all over the globe, and they thrive in the space where feel-good meets fast-paced.

Check out the McDonald’s Global Technology Technical Blog to learn how technology and our global team are directly enabling the Accelerating the Arches strategy.

Department Overview

The Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering is a delivery and quality-enablement leader within the Platform Resilience - Quality Pillar. This role ensures complex, cross-squad initiatives move predictably, safely, and with high quality across environments, markets, and platforms.

This role focuses on test strategy alignment, execution governance, integration sequencing, dependency management, test data readiness, and delivering a seamless user experience. It owns how change is validated across cross-functional teams, ensuring that features, initiatives, and platform capabilities comply with market and regulatory requirements, meet accessibility standards, and maintain performance benchmarks.

The role is responsible for managing features end-to-end, from initiation through activation across all markets, leveraging structured quality gates with a combination of automated promotions and manual certifications at each stage. This approach ensures that segment markets are protected from unstable code, allowing them to focus primarily on market-level business validations.

The role ensures delivery execution remains predictable, resilient, and quality-driven as scale and complexity increase. It requires strong ownership of quality gating, test coverage, automation strategy, and risk-based decision-making, ensuring cohesive, deployable, and production-ready outcomes rather than fragmented completion.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced quality engineering leader to help shape McDonald’s transformation. This role is based at our McDonald’s Global Headquarters in Chicago, IL.

Duties

Lead quality gating and release readiness for large-scale, customer-facing Restaurant Tech initiatives, ensuring high standards of delivery, reliability, and customer experience.

Establish and enforce consistent quality standards and governance across multiple workstreams, balancing delivery speed, risk, and business impact.

Drive quality process optimization and efficient tool adoption initiatives, including regression suite audits, enhancement of testing approaches, and continuous improvement of quality metrics to reduce friction and increase reliability.

Identify systemic inefficiencies within QA processes and implement scalable, sustainable solutions that improve effectiveness, predictability, and delivery outcomes.

Design and implement scalable, extensible test automation solutions for complex consumer-facing systems, including GUI-based automation, backend automation supporting dark deployments, and end-to-end asynchronous validation across distributed platforms.

Define and promote modern automation frameworks and best practices, establishing reusable patterns and technical standards adopted across teams.

Develop and maintain hybrid automation frameworks leveraging design patterns to ensure maintainability, scalability, and long-term extensibility.

Own end-to-end test strategy and execution for Restaurant Tech products across multiple devices, environments, and global markets, ensuring comprehensive coverage aligned with platform complexity and release timelines.

Partner with engineering, product, and QA stakeholders to align test approaches across global teams, including market/segment teams, offshore quality services, and platform QA organizations.

Drive clarity on cross-QA ownership models, eliminating duplication, closing gaps, and strengthening accountability across teams.

Manage complex, cross-functional initiatives simultaneously, prioritizing high-impact work and effectively negotiating trade-offs with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

Translate technical risks into clear business impact assessments, enabling informed and timely decision-making.

Lead launch readiness reviews and go/no-go decision forums, ensuring quality status, risk exposure, mitigation plans, and a clear "path to green" are communicated effectively.

Establish strong governance and alignment for release confidence, ensuring cross-functional stakeholders are aligned ahead of production deployments.

Conduct proactive risk analysis and mitigation planning, aligned to test strategy, scope, dependencies, and release timelines to ensure predictable delivery.

Identify critical risks early and drive cross-team corrective actions to protect timelines and quality outcomes.

Oversee Quality Services (QS) capacity, planning, and prioritization, including resource allocation, environment access readiness, and intake management across competing demands.

Reduce operational friction by removing testing blockers and streamlining dependencies across teams and environments.

Define and standardize QA processes and operating procedures (SOPs), supported by clear documentation, UML diagrams, and workflow models to enable adoption and scalability.

Promote documentation consistency and reusability, improving onboarding efficiency and operational maturity across teams.

Drive QA efficiency and continuous improvement initiatives, including regression optimization, audit frameworks, and process enhancements to improve speed, coverage, and productivity.

Foster a continuous improvement mindset, delivering measurable outcomes in release stability, defect prevention, and overall product quality.

Qualifications

Willingness and ability to live the McDonald’s values every day: Serve, Inclusion, Integrity, Community, and Family.

8+ years of experience in quality engineering, test leadership, release management, or cross-functional or new app testing strategy and management.

Proven experience leading quality gating, release readiness, and test execution for large-scale, customer-facing platforms.

Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, automation frameworks, and progressive delivery concepts.

Demonstrated ability to manage complex dependencies and ambiguity in fast-moving environments.

Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product, and operations.

Proven ability to work with and influence cross-functional teams and stakeholders.

Superior interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills.

Experience leading complex, cross-functional projects.

Curious and a self-starter with a strong bias for action; consistent track record of "getting things done".

Experience working on POS software, mobile apps and customer-facing digital products.

Detail-obsessed and able to meet deadlines.

Expertise in test strategy, defect prioritization, risk-based testing, and release planning.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in QSR, retail, hospitality, or large distributed systems.

Experience in Quality Engineering (QAE or SDET) roles, Quality Engineering Lead or Test Automation Lead/Architect roles.

Strong quality engineering practices, and test/defect management tools, along with hands-on experience in CI/CD pipelines and tooling.

Proficient in one or more programming languages such as Java or Python, with strong test automation scripting expertise using frameworks like Appium, Kotlin, Selenium, and similar technologies.

Experience in device testing across physical and virtual environments, including usage of device labs, simulators, and cloud-based platforms such as BrowserStack and Perfecto.

Demonstrated experience in field testing across production store environments, validating both digital front-end experiences and backend integrations under real-world conditions.

Compensation

Bonus Eligible: Yes

Long - Term Incentive: Yes

Benefits Eligible: Yes

Salary Range

The expected salary range for this role is $127,332.00 - $159,165.00 per year

The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we may also consider your experience, and other job-related factors.

Additional Information:

Benefits eligible: This position offers health and welfare benefits, including but not limited to comprehensive health insurance, which includes medical, prescription drug, mental health, dental and vision coverage, as well as, life insurance.

Bonus eligible: This position is eligible for a bonus, calculated based on individual and company performance.

Long term Incentive eligible: This position is eligible for stock or other equity grants pursuant to McDonald’s long-term incentive plan.

McDonald’s is an equal opportunity employer committed to the diversity of our workforce. We promote an inclusive work environment that creates feel-good moments for everyone. McDonald’s provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities as part of the application or hiring process or to perform the essential functions of their job. If you need assistance accessing or reading this job posting or otherwise feel you need an accommodation during the application or hiring process, please contact [email protected]. Reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

McDonald’s provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (including pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin, age, disability status, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, protected military or veteran status, citizenship status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Nothing in this job posting or description should be construed as an offer or guarantee of employment.