Sr. Manager, AI/ML Engineering

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.

Company Description:

McDonald's is scaling its global data platform to deliver real-time, actionable insights that enhance operations and elevate the customer experience. Through Enterprise Data, Analytics, and AI (EDAA), we're enabling a smarter, more connected ecosystem—driven by cloud technology, automation, and intelligent data engineering.

The Opportunity:

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with strong technical expertise to design, build, and deploy scalable ML/AI solutions. In this role, you will be responsible for developing robust machine learning pipelines, optimizing model performance, and contributing to the design of ML/AI products that drive real business impact. You will collaborate closely with data scientists, product managers, and platform engineers to bring advanced ML capabilities into production.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of ML engineers, guiding technical decisions, best practices, and development processes.
• Develop and train machine learning models, including feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and evaluation.
• Drive the transition of ML models from proof-of-concept to production deployment.
• Design, build, and maintain model deployment pipelines, including CI/CD workflows, model versioning, and automated testing.
• Develop and maintain robust monitoring systems to track model performance, data drift, feature quality, and system health.
• Design and develop backend services and APIs to integrate ML models with product systems and user-facing applications.
• Apply strong MLOps principles to ensure reliability, reproducibility, and operational excellence of ML systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (engineering, product, data, analytics) to deliver impactful, high-quality ML solutions.

Qualifications:

Required:

• Master's degree in computer science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in ML engineering, model development, or related technical roles.
• Proven experience training, developing, and deploying ML models in real-world production environments.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineering teams and driving complex ML projects to successful production deployment.
• Strong experience with API development (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, Django) and backend service design.
• Proficiency in Python and standard ML frameworks (Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Strong understanding of MLOps tools and practices, such as MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, Prefect, Docker, Kubernetes.
• Experience building feature pipelines, data processing workflows, and optimizing model performance.
• Experience with monitoring tools and performance alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, custom monitoring).
• Preferred:
• Experience with distributed computing frameworks (Spark, Ray, Dask).
• Familiarity with microservices, event-driven architectures, or message queues.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) or platform-agnostic orchestration tools.
• Experience working in a fast-paced, experimentation-driven environment.

McDonald's Values:

Our shared values create the foundation for how we work:

• Serve: Customers and people come first
• Inclusion: All are welcome
• Integrity: We act with honesty
• Community: We support and uplift each other
• Family: We learn and grow together

Equal Opportunity Statement:

McDonald's believes in equal opportunity and a workplace where everyone belongs. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and are committed to creating a diverse, inclusive environment where everyone can thrive.