A place to create and innovate
Get to know Senior Manager, Software Development, Damian Sullivan.
After working at a major tech company for 11 years followed by a short sabbatical to focus on his own projects, Damian landed at McDonald’s. Learn why he came, what he’s learning and where he wants to be.
Why did you come to McDonald’s?
The culture is changing at McDonald’s, big time. This is the reason why I came to work here. McDonald’s is focusing on innovation and technology. It’s revolutionary and very cool. They are really seeing the value of engineering in general. At McDonald’s, we have interesting use cases and the problems that we present and how we solve them will be cool to talk about.
Can you talk about your career journey leading up to McDonald’s?
I was running the ads at a major tech company and was on the team that did machine learning, predicting ad traffic to make better, accurate predictions for ads. It was cool, but I hit 11 years there and needed to take a break.
Then the pandemic hit, and a team leader here asked me if I’d like to come and build some teams because they were hiring.
McDonald's is such a part of our social fabric. It’s where you go when you’re a kid and get Chicken McNuggets® and Fries. It’s such a part of our shared experience as humans, and I thought it would be cool to do tech stuff at McDonald’s.
How do you bring innovation to your day-to-day at McDonald’s?
To come up with our best and most creative ideas I try to strike a balance between a more formal business posture of deadlines and results and creativity and flow. A walled garden where engineers feel safe to experiment and are empowered to create whatever they think is necessary. But also keep things agile and boxed, so we can deliver.
Do you think that McDonald’s sees tech as creative?
McDonald’s definitely recognizes creativity. We’ll come to a place in the middle where there is room for some playing around, and not everything we make has to stick. McDonald’s is constantly moving and transforming, and we’ve been able to translate that culture to engineering… there are thousands of things happening.
What do you think would surprise people about the technology at McDonald’s?
In the 21 years I have been in tech, I have never seen so many options available to us as engineers. It’s just mind-blowing. We’re finally getting to this place where the software is catching up with the hardware. It’s dizzying. For instance, a lot of people don’t realize that the McDonald’s app has hundreds of microservices behind it, and tons of tech employees put that together. It’s massive and amazing behind the scenes.
