SENIOR MANAGER, ENGINEERING, OPERATIONS

Job Description

The KFC Global Sr. Manager of Engineering drives the development, innovation, and execution of the brand's equipment strategy and serves as the lead of the Engineering Center of Excellence (COE).

This role partners to define standards and safety processes, drive supply specifications improvement, and ensure quality, ultimately supporting business growth.

Equipment Strategy Development (50%)

• Improve restaurant unit economics to drive business growth through cooking equipment efficiency, SKU reduction, and new equipment introduction.
• Develop and maintain an equipment engineering strategy aligned to KFC's growth strategy, partnering with regional COE leads.
• Drive regional COE leads, through partnership with Training teams, to create and deploy global equipment training.
• Develop and introduce new equipment that improves efficiency, safety, and food quality.
• Enable innovative engineering solutions through partnerships with restaurant cooking equipment vendors, sister brands, and Yum! Innovation team.
• Cultivate innovative cooking equipment technologies to be tested and scaled across the brand globally.
• Serve on KFC Global Brand Standards Council, ensuring we maintain and continue improving our Core products and standards.

Enable KFC's Growth Priorities through equipment engineering leadership (25%)

• Next-Generation Restaurants : Manage equipment development and partner as SME on back-of-house design.
• Drive-Thru : Partner with Digital teams on drive-thru optimization.
• Dayparts : Manage new equipment innovation, providing end-to-end support from development to production.
• Connected Restaurants : Support enhanced connectivity to middle- and back-of-house equipment and technologies.

Regional Strategy Deployment (25%)

• Drive development and maintenance of global brand standards and equipment engineering standards through regional COE leads, in partnership with Operations Standards team.
• Develop methods of measuring global progress against equipment strategy and other KPIs.
• Partner with regional and business unit COE leads to gather and integrate market and franchisee feedback into global engineering strategy.

Education / Certifications

• Required : Bachelor's degree
• Preferred : Related engineering degree, MBA

Required Experience :

• 5+ years of experience in related engineering field.
• A strong safety-first mindset.
• Proven technical and analytical skills with the ability to think critically.
• Ability to flex between big picture and hands-on / detailed work.
• Proven track record leading and developing others.
• Successfully created end to end solutions.
• Experience collaborating across various functions, brands, and regions.
• Successfully managed large-scale projects and budgets.
• Experience building and maintaining vendor relationships.
• Experience developing and managing holistic strategies for sustained growth.
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguous and emerging scenarios.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Ability to influence without direct authority.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite of tools.

Preferred Experience :

• Prior experience in restaurant cooking equipment.
• Prior experience in global, matrix organizations.

About Us

Who is KFC?

KFC, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE : YUM.), is a global chicken restaurant brand with a rich, decades-long history of success and innovation.

It all started with one cook, Colonel Harland Sanders, who believed in doing things the hard way, because nothing ever got done right by cutting corners.

Hard work, hospitality and integrity are still core to our brand today.

While we're grounded in our heritage, we're always looking forward to the future and evolving to make it easier for our customers to enjoy our chicken.

Through digital innovation, our goal is to make KFC available everywhere, implementing a frictionless & friendly experience leveraging scalable technology stack and standards and accelerating rollouts via multiple channels.

And we're growing... a new KFC restaurant opens somewhere in the world every six hours.

As we grow, KFC is committed to doing so responsibly through commitments like our 2025 global plastic packaging goal and the KFC Harvest program, which to date has donated over 82 million pounds of food to our local communities around the world.

Our purposes is feeding people's potential, whether that means helping team members get through school, turn their passion for fried chicken into a career, or being a positive force in our communities.

We fight inequality and believe in all people. Everyone has a seat at our table : from millionaires to truck drivers, to our more than 800,000 Team Members, to our customers around the world, KFC treats everyone like family.

Our people are what make us distinctively KFC, and we value every opportunity to celebrate the unique perspectives and backgrounds they bring to our company.

To learn more about KFC Global, check out our company page here.