RTC Restaurant Technology
The Restaurant Technology portfolio is the set of restaurant and business applications that power day-to-day operations across our restaurants and the business behind them. You will architect the cloud and platform foundation that these applications run on today and as the portfolio modernizes, with a focus on reliability, performance, and security for systems that restaurants depend on every hour they are open.
OXP / Digital Engineering
The Digital Engineering portfolio is made up of our customer-facing Whataburger digital applications, including:
- The Whataburger mobile app (iOS and Android)
- Whataburger.com
- Loyalty
- Other applications and services that sit under the digital portfolio
These applications are built, or will be built, on top of the infrastructure and platform you will design and architect.
Key Responsibilities
Cloud-Native Architecture & Design
- Lead architecture and design conversations for the RTC and OXP/Digital portfolios with engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders.
- Design cloud-native reference architectures on Azure and GCP using containers, managed Kubernetes (AKS, GKE), serverless, and managed data and messaging services.
- Architect and guide the build of active-active, multi-region platforms, including global traffic management, data replication, failover, and resiliency patterns that meet defined RTO/RPO and SLO targets for mobile app, web, loyalty, and restaurant-facing systems.
- Run architecture reviews and design authority checkpoints, and drive tradeoff decisions across cost, performance, resilience, security, and portability between Azure and GCP.
Platform Engineering & Developer Experience
- Design and evolve the internal developer platform: self-service provisioning, golden paths, service templates, and a developer portal (e.g., Backstage) used by RTC and Digital application teams.
- Define multi-tenant Kubernetes platform standards, including cluster topology, networking, ingress, service mesh, secrets management, and workload identity.
- Build the platform as a product: set a roadmap, gather feedback from engineering teams, and measure adoption and developer productivity.
- Provide build oversight to ensure delivery teams follow architectural standards and platform best practices.
CI/CD & Engineering Frameworks
- Define and evolve the next-generation CI/CD strategy: pipeline standards, release patterns (blue/green, canary, progressive delivery), and environment promotion models.
- Design and oversee reusable pipeline frameworks and templates across Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy, or equivalent tooling.
- Embed automated quality, security (DevSecOps), supply chain controls, and policy-as-code gates (e.g., Azure Policy, GCP Organization Policy, OPA/Gatekeeper) into pipelines.
Infrastructure as Code & GitOps
- Establish IaC standards and modular patterns (Terraform preferred; Bicep and Crossplane or equivalent as needed) with strong governance, testing, and drift detection.
- Champion GitOps (Argo CD, Flux) and automation-first practices across provisioning, configuration, and operations.
- Design landing zones and multi-subscription / multi-project structures with consistent guardrails for identity, networking, and security.
SRE Engineering
- Partner with SRE to embed reliability into the platform: SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, observability (OpenTelemetry-based), alerting, and incident response practices. Help building the best-in-class SRE Dashboards both from business and Technology standpoint to view everything in single-pane of glass.
- Design resilience testing, including chaos engineering and failover exercises, and contribute to DR/BCP planning and operational readiness for production launches.
- Build reliability and operability standards into golden paths so every application inherits them by default.
AI Engineering
- Apply AI and GenAI tooling to accelerate architecture, IaC and pipeline authoring, code review, incident analysis, and operational insights.
- Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted platform and SRE capabilities (e.g., intelligent pipeline optimization, anomaly detection and AIOps, automated documentation, self-service assistants) with appropriate guardrails.
- Design the cloud foundation for AI workloads using Azure AI / Azure OpenAI and GCP Vertex AI where programs require it.
Security & Cost
- Partner with security and FinOps to build identity, data protection, compliance, and cost optimization into every design.
Required Qualifications
- [8–12 ] years in cloud, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with [3 ] years in a cloud architect role.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in Azure and GCP, including core services for compute, networking, identity, storage, and managed data.
- Strong cloud-native experience: Kubernetes (AKS and GKE), containers, microservices, service mesh, and event-driven architectures.
- Proven experience designing and delivering active-active / multi-region architectures for high-volume, customer-facing platforms.
- Strong IaC skills (Terraform required) and experience building modular, reusable code at scale.
- Hands-on experience designing CI/CD platforms and frameworks, with GitOps practices (Argo CD or Flux).
- Working knowledge of SRE practices: SLOs, observability, incident management, and resilience engineering.
- Experience building or operating an internal developer platform with a platform-as-a-product mindset.
- Demonstrated experience applying AI/GenAI tools to engineering or operations workflows.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with restaurant/QSR, retail, e-commerce, or omnichannel digital ordering, mobile, and loyalty platforms.
- Experience supporting restaurant-facing or edge-connected systems alongside cloud platforms.
- Experience with API management and gateways (Azure API Management, Apigee), and distributed data stores (Cosmos DB, Spanner, or similar).
- Familiarity with observability stacks (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, Cloud Operations).
- Cloud certifications such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Terraform Associate, or CKA/CKAD.
- Experience with Backstage or similar developer portal tooling.
What Success Looks Like
- RTC and OXP/Digital applications (mobile app, Whataburger.com, loyalty, and the wider portfolio) run on resilient, active-active, cloud-native infrastructure that meets availability and performance targets and any Infrastructure builds which are versioned and automated from all use cases standpoint.
- A self-service internal developer platform and standardized CI/CD frameworks adopted across teams, with measurable gains in deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate.
- SRE and AI engineering practices are built into the platform, improving reliability, incident response, and developer productivity.
- IaC, GitOps, and AI-assisted practices become the default way teams build and operate on Azure and GCP.
