Global Network Operations Leader — Automation & Incidents

McDonald's Corporation; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 153,000 - 191,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Stock/Equity grants

Bonus eligible

Job summary

McDonald’s Corporation seeks a Sr. Manager, Network Operations within Global Technology to lead a globally distributed team responsible for the availability, performance, and resilience of the restaurant network across markets.

You will own vendor relationships, drive automation and AI-driven improvements, manage budgets, and partner with Global Network Engineering, Deployment, Product, and Security to deliver reliable connectivity and scalable operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Network Operations or Engineering
• 5+ years leading operations teams across regions or time zones
• Strong hands-on experience with Juniper networking and Palo Alto security platforms
• Strong understanding of network monitoring, ITIL-based incident/change management, and SLA-driven operations
• Experience leading product backlogs, roadmaps, and Agile/scrum delivery, including portfolio budget ownership
• Demonstrated experience managing vendors, carriers, and managed service providers
• Proven success delivering network automation for scale, reliability, and consistency

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a globally distributed team of Network Operations Engineers and senior technical resources across geographies, including workload planning and prioritization, performance management, coaching, and career development
• Establish global operations standards, operating models, and ways of working
• Build a culture of accountability, AI-driven innovation, automation-first thinking, and continuous improvement
• Lead and drive product backlogs and functional requirements with business and technology stakeholders, aligned to network operations
• Define and influence product roadmaps with recommendations on how operational functionality, workflows, and user journeys should be defined, leveraging the technology stack's capabilities
• Operate as part of a scrum team, managing backlogs and delivery in Jira and partnering with scrum teams and business analysts to map capabilities to processes
• Own portfolio finances and budget, ensuring backlogs and prioritization align with the committed budget
• Own global market onboarding into network operations for GRNT adoption — transitioning deployed markets from project delivery into steady-state run and support
• Lead operational readiness assessments — monitoring, observability, alerting, runbooks, on-call coverage, and SLA/SLO baselining — prior to production handover
• Partner with Global Network Engineering and Deployment to ensure a clean handoff into operations, with knowledge transfer and support models in place
• Ensure onboarded markets meet global operability standards while allowing controlled local flexibility where required
• Feed operational lessons learned back into onboarding playbooks, runbooks, and standards
• Own global network service health, availability, and SLA/SLO performance, ensuring uptime meets or exceeds targets
• Own the global NOC and a follow-the-sun, on-call support model, driven by observability and AIOps for proactive detection and response
• Provide leadership for incident response and escalation, including:
• Incident command for major and multi-market events
• Change management governance and maintenance windows
• Root-cause analysis and operational KPI reporting
• Govern operational exceptions, ensuring deviations are deliberate, documented, and minimized
• Partner with Global Network Engineering to lead problem management across markets
• Own engineering responses to recurring or high-impact issues
• Drive corrective actions that improve global stability, resilience, and efficiency
• Own global vendor, carrier, and managed service provider relationships, including contract and SLA negotiation, carrier and circuit management, escalations, and service reviews
• Drive performance and cost efficiency across multi-vendor ecosystems, partnering with Procurement, Finance, and Legal to align vendor strategy with global standards and budget
• Define and lead the global network operations automation strategy, focused on: Automated monitoring and self-healing; Deployment and change automation; Reduction of manual effort and error at scale
• Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to prioritize automation that delivers measurable global impact
• Maintain active technical engagement in large-scale, globally distributed environments, including service health reviews and sophisticated troubleshooting
• Provide senior technical leadership across: WAN, LAN, and SD-WAN; Network security and SASE architectures; Cloud-adjacent and edge networking

Skills

Network Operations

Team Leadership

Agile / Scrum

Vendor Management

Incident Command

Automation & AIOps

Tools

Juniper network equipment

Palo Alto firewalls

ITIL incident/change

Jira

Job description

McDonald’s Corporation seeks a Sr. Manager, Network Operations within Global Technology to lead a globally distributed team responsible for the availability, performance, and resilience of the restaurant network across markets.

You will own vendor relationships, drive automation and AI-driven improvements, manage budgets, and partner with Global Network Engineering, Deployment, Product, and Security to deliver reliable connectivity and scalable operations.