Chief Orchestration Officer
Company Description
McDonald’s is one of the world’s largest service systems: millions of daily customer interactions, complex supply networks, and operations that must remain consistent under pressure. In this era, “operations” increasingly means the stewardship of large numbers of agentic operators that do the medial work of keeping the enterprise functioning.
We are building a new executive function: Intention Orchestration. This practice treats operational excellence as the explicit management of goals, intentions, policies, and verification loops across human teams and agentic collaborators.
Job Description
The Chief Orchestration Officer (COO) leads McDonald’s enterprise orchestration program and the Orchestration Operations group. You will report to the Office of the CEO and operate as a peer partner to the CIO, CTO, and ML leadership. Your mandate is to keep a large fleet of agentic operators coherent: aligned to shared intentions, reliably executed, and continuously improved without degrading safety, trust, or accountability.
In practice, this looks like designing and maintaining the “contracts” that make large-scale agentic work function: the goals.md, intention.md, and policy.md artifacts that define what we are trying to achieve, how we will behave while pursuing it, and how we verify results. You will build the operating cadence that keeps those artifacts current, legible, and enforced across distributed teams and systems.
This role is not a novelty layer on top of automation. It is the bedrock work of governance-by-artifact: the caring, management, articulation, deployment, wrangling, herding, and oversight required for agents to be productive rather than chaotic.
Qualifications
- 15+ years leading operations, platform, reliability, or enterprise transformation programs with measurable outcomes in complex, distributed environments.
- Demonstrated ability to build operating systems: documentation, policy, tooling, and rituals that scale across functions.
- Experience managing teams responsible for cross-functional execution, incident response, and continuous improvement.
- Strong writing and editorial discipline: you can author and maintain clear operational contracts (
goals.md,intention.md,policy.md) that other teams can actually use. - Technical fluency sufficient to partner with CIO/CTO/ML leadership on agent architecture, permissions, evaluation, and verification workflows.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience orchestrating agentic systems in production (task routing, tool access, guardrails, human-in-the-loop escalation, monitoring, and regression management).
- Background in sociotechnical practice (STS, organizational design, anthropology, facilitation) that strengthens how you design rituals, incentives, and accountability.
- Track record operating across very different org types (independent work, entrepreneurial contexts, and large commercial institutions).
Additional Information
- Reports to: Office of the CEO; partners closely with CIO, CTO, and ML leadership.
- Build and lead the Orchestration Operations group (team design, hiring, career ladders, and operational excellence standards).
- Own enterprise-level incident escalation for agentic operations, including root cause analysis and policy/tooling changes to prevent recurrence.
- Hybrid role based in Chicago, IL; periodic travel to corporate and field sites.
More Context
Notices
McDonald’s is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing reasonable accommodations during the application process.
To request an accommodation for corporately owned restaurant locations, contact mcdhrbenefits@us.mcd.com.