Description
Principal Engineer
Team: Global McDonald's Account
Location: Chicago, IL
Commitment: Full-time
Workplace Type: hybrid
Salary:
Pay is based on relevant experience, skills, education, internal equity, and market data. Well-qualified candidates can generally expect offers around the midpoint. Candidates who meet the minimum qualifications but have more limited directly relevant experience for this specific role are typically placed nearer the minimum, while highly experienced candidates with strong role alignment may be placed closer to the maximum.
Be Part of Our Next Chapter
For over almost 60 years, our solutions have enabled impactful connections between some of the world’s leading brands and their customers. And while we’ve already done a lot of work we’re proud of, we’re just getting started!
We’re a global technology company focused on creating dynamic, smart, personalized and engaging customer experiences powered by our range of digital hardware, our proprietary content management system and our industry leading signage solutions. (For example: If you’ve ordered in-store or in the drive-thru at McDonald’s somewhere in the world in the last few years, chances are you’ve interacted with our digital solutions.) We work in over 50 global markets and have 9 offices around the world, with a global headquarters proudly located in our founding home of Sydney, Australia.
Coates Group has the values of a family-owned business and the innovative spirit of a start-up, both which fuel our purpose – Creating Connections. Empowering Partnerships. Always Evolving. Through hard work, dedication and creativity, we’ve become industry leaders who have won awards and set records while remaining focused on continual growth and evolution. We are a 2x Australia Good Design Award winner and successfully completed the largest hardware deployment in Quick Service Restaurant history.
We are curious, charismatic, authentic and we value and leverage the diversity of our crew. We are imaginers, kindness enthusiasts, experts, creators, thinkers, challengers, collaborators and over-achievers. And together, as a Crew, we are revolutionizing the way the world’s leading brands leverage technology to drive the best customer experiences.
The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long-term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.
Responsibilities
- Technical Direction & Architecture (Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes)
- Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi-platform technical roadmaps
- Leads the design of large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems across teams
- Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability in major technical decisions
- Engineering Excellence & Governance (Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision-making enable high-quality, consistent delivery at scale)
- Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice.
- Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations.
- Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design.
- Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability (Owns the long-term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt)
- Identifies and resolves cross-domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations.
- Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges.
- Leads root-cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes.
- Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence (Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership)
- Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking.
- Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision-making.
- Communicates technical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders.
Capabilities
- Architecture Leadership
- Technical Depth
- Systems Thinking
- Complex Problem Solving
- Strategic Technology Judgement
- Influence Without Authority
- Delivery Enablement
Qualifications
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large-scale, complex, or mission-critical systems
- Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms
- Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain
- Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations, platform initiatives, or modernization efforts
- Experience operating at senior stakeholder level, communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences
- Hands-on experience in modern engineering practices (e.g., cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security-by-design, AI)
About Coates
We are industry leaders who have won awards and set records. We are a 2x Australia Good Design Award winner and we successfully completed the largest hardware deployment in Quick Service Restaurant history.
We are led by a forward-thinking CEO who has demonstrated a true passion for people and making Coates a place where people genuinely enjoy working. Our growth plans enable a focus on providing rapid career advancement opportunities for our talent.
Together, we are creators, allowing us to make our purpose a reality – to create immersive brand experiences for everyone.
Join a Crew that Cares
Be part of a global team of talented, ambitious, creative people that value integrity, individuality and inclusivity. (Ask us about our Equality + Empowerment Initiatives).
The benefits include an annual market competitive bonus program and our “Thrive Program” which includes a suite of flexible work options because we’re strong believers that you should never miss an important life or work moment. Thrive also provides dedicated time to prioritize our health and wellbeing (think virtual Yoga or meditation sessions), a Global Wellness paid day off to recharge as well as a “Give Back Day” to allow our Crew an opportunity to make an impact in the community.
Be inspired To Be More
We skip the red tape and aim to always stay nimble. We’re proud of where we’ve been and are energized by where we’re going. We encourage ideas and perspectives because we know the more we have, the better we are. We work hard but have fun along the way. We push the boundaries but keep it real and authentic. We believe in the values that got us here are the ones that will continue to lead us forward. We are excited by what we’ve accomplished, but know the best is yet to come.
Coates Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, national or ethnic origin, gender, religion, disability, age, political affiliation or belief, disabled veteran, veteran of the Vietnam Era, or citizenship status (except in those special circumstances permitted or mandated by law).
Fraud Alert: Employment Scam Advisory
It has come to our attention that unauthorised individuals are impersonating our company and reaching out to job seekers through fraudulent emails, falsely claiming to represent Coates. These emails often request personal information and appear to come from domains that are not affiliated with our organisation, such as coatesgroupcareer.com.
We take this matter very seriously. Coates has reported these incidents to law enforcement and is cooperating with the ongoing investigation. We are committed to protecting the integrity of our recruitment process and the privacy of our applicants.
Please be advised of the following:
- Coates does not operate or communicate through any domain resembling "@coatesgroupcareer.com"
- We do not contact employment candidates via email to solicit personal or financial information
- All applications for employment must be submitted through our official website https://coatesgroup.com/careers or directly through our LinkedIn profile: Coates Group
- All emails from us will come from our official domain, which is [at]coatesgroup[dot]com or via our Applicant - Tracking System (ATS) email address, which is no-reply[at]hire.lever[dot]co
If you receive any suspicious communications purporting to be from Coates, we urge you not to respond, do not click any links, and do not provide any personal information. Your safety and trust are of the utmost importance to us. Thank you for your vigilance.
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