Principal Engineer T500-21450

About McDonald's:

One of the world's largest employers with locations in more than 100 countries, McDonald's Corporation has corporate opportunities in Hyderabad. Our global offices serve as dynamic innovation and operations hubs, designed to expand McDonald's global talent base and in-house expertise. Our new office in Hyderabad will bring together knowledge across business, technology, analytics, and AI, accelerating our ability to deliver impactful solutions for the business and our customers across the globe.

Position Summary:

Principal Engineer – AI-Agentic:

Who we're looking for:

McDonald's is building the next generation of AI-powered solutions to transform customer and crew experiences worldwide
.
We are seeking an AI Engineer with deep expertise in
Agentic AI and
Agentic Workflow development to join our AI team.
In this role, you will conduct cutting-edge research in Agentic AI and deploy scalable solutions across McDonald's global ecosystem — from powering voice
ordering in drive-thrus
,
to
multilingual chatbots for customer care
,
to knowledge assistants for crew training and restaurant operations.
Your work will directly impact
millions of customers and crew members every day across more than 100+ countries.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design and develop AI agent systems using frameworks like LangGraph and CrewAI that can effectively understand, reason about, and execute professional services workflows
• Implement solutions in Python, leveraging libraries such as Hugging Face, LangChain, Haystack, spaCy, NLTK, and integrate with vector databases
• Distill AI research into relevant soluitons including fine-tuning (LoRA, PEFT), evaluation, and deployment. Includes prompt engineering, instruction tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF).
• Collaborate with AI Engineers, LLMOps/MLOps engineers, and product teams to translate multimodal data into scalable NLP solutions.
• Develop Agentic workflows and deployment workflows using Google Agents pace
• Mentor junior AI engineers and foster the culture of Lunch & Learns.
• Stay current with advances in AI research and tools, bringing novel techniques into enterprise applications.
• Support enterprise AI governance, compliance, and risk management for LLM-driven solutions, ensuring adherence to ethical AI principles and responsible deployment.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, AI/ML, or a related field
• 11-15 years of overall experience in hands-on engineering, with 6+ years of mandatory experience in AI/ML engineering in the Agentic space
• Strong expertise in Python programming language and proficiency with AI/ML frameworks (e.g., LangGraph and CrewAI)
• Deep understanding of deep learning algorithms, NLP frameworks, transformer architecture, data structures, and model optimization techniques
• Experience working with cloud AI platforms and services (e.g., GCP, AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform, Azure ML) , preferably GCP
• Ability to clearly communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Strong collaboration skills with cross-functional teams in fast-paced environments
• Demonstrated ability to contribute to innovation and continuous improvement in AI practices

Bonus points if you have any of the following:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science/AI or a related field
• 6+ years of experience in Agentic development, Agentic workflow development
• 6+ years of experience with design, deployment, and evaluation of diffusion models/ pre-trained NLP models (e.g., BERT, GPT, LlaMa) etc.
• Experience in MLOps/DLOps

Work location:
Hyderabad, India

Work hours:

Monday to Friday, 8 hrs/day

Work pattern:
Full time role

Work mode:
Hybrid.

Additional Information:

McDonald's is committed to providing qualified individuals with disabilities with reasonable accommodations to perform the essential functions of their jobs. McDonald's provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (including pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin, age, disability status, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, protected military or veteran status, citizenship status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

McDonald's Capability Center India Private Limited ("McDonald's in India") is a proud equal opportunity employer and is committed to hiring a diverse workforce and sustaining an inclusive culture. At McDonald's in India, employment decisions are based on merit, job requirements, and business needs, and all qualified candidates are considered for employment. McDonald's in India does not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, age, gender, marital status, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, political affiliation, veteran status, disability status, medical history, parental status, genetic information, or any other basis protected under state or local laws.