Platform Architecture- Senior Data Architect

Department Overview

This opportunity is part of the Global Technology Enterprise Products & Platforms (EPP) team, focused on Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and the design of trusted, scalable, and secure data capabilities across McDonald’s global enterprise.

The Sr Data Architect is a senior individual contributor responsible for defining data architecture, models, standards, integration patterns, and governance requirements that enable reliable operational reporting, analytics, automation, and data-driven decision-making. The architect collaborates with enterprise and solution architects, data engineers, product teams, cybersecurity partners, and business stakeholders to align data solutions with business outcomes and the broader technology strategy.

Duties

• Define current-state, transition-state, and future-state data architecture aligned with business and technology strategies.
• Develop data architecture principles, standards, reference patterns, and roadmaps for enterprise platforms and products.
• Evaluate data technologies and architectural approaches, documenting decisions, trade-offs, dependencies, and risks.
• Create and govern conceptual, logical, and physical data models across business and technology domains.
• Define canonical models, taxonomies, schemas, naming conventions, and data contracts that promote consistency and reuse.
• Guide the design of operational, analytical, integration, and reporting data structures.
• Define patterns for data ingestion, transformation, movement, storage, access, and interoperability across systems.
• Guide architecture for batch, event-driven, API-based, and near-real-time data integration solutions.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure data platforms and pipelines are scalable, reliable, observable, and supportable.
• Establish architecture requirements for data quality, metadata, lineage, retention, classification, privacy, and access controls.
• Partner with governance, cybersecurity, legal, privacy, and risk stakeholders to embed applicable controls into solution designs.
• Promote trusted data through authoritative-source principles, stewardship, traceability, and measurable quality standards.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide technical direction for complex, cross-domain data initiatives.
• Collaborate with product, analytics, data science, and engineering teams to translate business needs into durable data solutions.
• Mentor architects and engineers, communicate architectural decisions to stakeholders, and contribute to architecture communities of practice.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology, or equivalent.
• 13+ years in data architecture, data engineering, solution architecture, or related enterprise technology roles, including ownership of complex data designs.
• Expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, including relational, dimensional, and domain-oriented approaches.
• Experience architecting cloud data platforms, warehouses, lakes or lakehouses, operational data stores, and integration services.
• Strong knowledge of data governance, metadata, lineage, master and reference data, quality, retention, privacy, and security.
• Experience with ETL/ELT, APIs, event streaming, messaging, and batch and real-time integration patterns.
• Ability to define architecture standards, reference patterns, decision records, and technology roadmaps.
• Working knowledge of analytics, business intelligence, AI/ML, and operational reporting.
• Understanding of enterprise architecture, Agile delivery, data products, architecture governance, secure design, and technology lifecycle management.

Certifications (Required / Preferred)

• CIS, CSA, CIS-EM / CIS-SAM – Required
• ServiceNow Certified Technical Architect (CTA) or Certified Master Architect (CMA) - Strongly preferred
• ITIL v3/v4 Managing Professional - Preferred
• Relevant cloud data architecture certification
• Data management or governance certification, such as CDMP
• Enterprise architecture certification, such as TOGAF
• Relevant data platform certification