VP Orchestration and Implications Unit

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Company Description

McDonald’s is one of the world’s largest operational systems: vast supply chains, dense service choreography, millions of daily transactions, and increasingly, large fleets of human and agentic operators working together across planning, execution, and adaptation.

As orchestration becomes a core executive discipline, McDonald’s is building an Orchestration and Implications Unit: a senior function responsible for identifying how emerging technical, cultural, and operational implications can be turned into new products, services, workflows, and enterprise capabilities before they arrive as friction, drift, or missed opportunity.

Job Description

The VP Orchestration and Implications Unit reports directly to the Chief Orchestration Officer and leads a small, high-leverage group focused on implication sensing, artifact-led inquiry, and concept generation. This role treats creative consciousness as a strategic operating capability: not imagination as ornamental ideation, but as a disciplined way of discerning opportunities, tracing consequences, and turning those insights into actionable prototypes.

You will work across operations, product, data, ML, supply systems, customer experience, and field execution to surface what new agentic processes imply for the enterprise. From there, you will convert implications into generative concepts: new service models, new internal tools, new operating rituals, and new product directions that can be tested before they calcify into default behavior.

This is a senior generalist role. Specialists need not apply. We are looking for someone who can think like an engineer, reason like a humanist, write like a strategist, and make like a builder.

Qualifications

  • 12+ years operating across complex technical, operational, and organizational environments with clear evidence of strategic and executional impact.
  • Demonstrated generalist range: you can move credibly across software, systems, operations, culture, research, and organizational design.
  • Track record of turning ambiguous implications into concrete artifacts, prototypes, or programs that changed decisions.
  • Strong writing and communication practice: you can produce documents, concepts, and presentations that align executive and operational audiences.
  • Technical fluency sufficient to work closely with engineering, data, ML, and platform teams without outsourcing judgment.
  • A history of multidisciplinary work with real stakes, not superficial participation across domains.
  • Experience outside traditional corporate structures, such as entrepreneurship, independent practice, field-building, community leadership, or institution-making.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Founder/operator experience or equivalent end-to-end ownership in uncertain, fast-moving environments.
  • Experience creating both software and hardware prototypes, or leading teams that work across digital and physical systems.
  • Evidence of serious creative practice: writing, public speaking, publishing, workshops, exhibitions, making, or other forms of public synthesis.
  • Background in humanities-informed technical practice, such as STS, anthropology, systems thinking, design research, or adjacent disciplines.
  • Experience leading communities, cross-functional programs, or distributed groups where trust, clarity, and shared language were mission-critical.

Additional Information

  • Reports directly to the Chief Orchestration Officer and partners across CIO, CTO, product, operations, and field leadership.
  • Build and lead the Orchestration and Implications Unit, including team design, hiring, operating cadence, and artifact standards.
  • Translate implication sensing into new concepts for products, services, and agentic processes that can be evaluated in real operational settings.
  • Develop and maintain an executive-facing practice for implication review, including concept briefs, prototypes, scenario artifacts, and roadmap recommendations.
  • Hybrid role based in Chicago, IL; periodic travel to corporate, field, and partner sites.

More Context

This unit exists to keep the enterprise from becoming merely reactive. We use implication tracing, artifact-making, and disciplined concept generation to ensure new capabilities are shaped before they are simply inherited.

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.