Chris Gundersen Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Define and communicate the strategy, vision, and product roadmap for McDonald's global observability platform. Plan budget and team capacity based on business needs and industry offerings to deliver unified, best-in-class observability tech stack and capabilities.LEADERSHIP: Lead a team responsible for the implementation, management, and evolution of observability practices and tools across McDonald's customer and crew facing tech stacks. Regularly engage in hands on use of observability tools in place for mobile, APM, infrastructure, and cost monitoring. Mentor and guide team members to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT: Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to ensure comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting capabilities are in place to proactively identify and mitigate potential issues, reducing downtime and enhancing system availability. Develop and maintain strong relationships with stakeholders including engineering teams, product managers, and executive leadership to align observability and AI Ops strategies with business objectives.INDUSTRY ENGAGEMENT: Consistently stay abreast of emerging trends and technologies in the observability and AI Ops space through hands on evaluation and recommendations that drive innovation and competitive advantage. Presented at industry conference on innovative use of observability for monitoring and measuring cost in context.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

DIGITAL TECH FINOPS: Established and implemented FinOps framework & function within McDonald’s Global Technology. Fully responsible for cloud spend, forecasting, budgeting, and affordability of continuously evolving Digital tech stack, which serves millions of customers daily. Regularly collaborate with stakeholders including architects, engineers, executives, markets, finance, and technology providers in weighing cloud cost models against technical use cases, non-functional requirements, and business requirements in making technology decisions. CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION: Leading cost optimization of mission critical Digital technology, including containerized microservices and cloud infrastructure spanning compute, database, networking, storage, CDN, WAF/DDOS, serverless, and numerous cloud native services. Efforts produced annual savings of 10%, all while maintaining 99.9% uptime at a time during which McDonald’s Digital business more than doubled. COST TRANSPARENCY: Developed tagging standards, tools, and process to systematically track cloud deployments, consumption, and cost in real-time. Introduced ability to track Kubernetes container-level costs, enabling development squads to measure microservice costs in real-time.MONITORING & RELIABILITY: Responsible for ownership and adoption of New Relic observability platform, which provides real-time visibility to mission critical components of the McDonald’s tech stack. Introduced and implemented Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) & Error Budgets for measuring throughput, performance, and reliability of McDonald’s mobile app and Digital stack, positioning McDonald’s to consistently meet or exceed uptime goal of 99.9%.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Responsible for technical team of 5 employees that supports development and solution integration of McDonald’s eCommerce Platform. Team enables digital growth strategy through technical support, triage, and resolution of issues encountered in solution integration testing. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT: Provide regular, concise communication to technical teams, market stakeholders, and senior leadership to keep cross-functional teams aligned on break/fix strategy & timelines. BUSINESS STRATEGY ENABLEMENT: Successfully executed solution integration and defect resolution for two major eCommerce Platform releases that were deployed to over 1M customers across 5 countries.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Responsible for team of 3 employees and SDLC management for a global, enterprise POS data management application used by 33,000 McDonald’s restaurants globally.PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Independently completed comprehensive future state assessment of application looking at team structure, financial model, hosting strategy, application usability, and stability. Showcased new software applications at McDonald's Worldwide Convention. PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Built, aligned, and maintained complex development and deployment project plans for several major and minor releases that were deployed to production

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Fully responsible for SDLC and project management of 3 software applications built to improve uptime of McDonald’s kitchen equipment globally. RESULTS DRIVEN: Delivered McDonald’s Equipment Resource Center application to US Market, which enabled Owner/Operators to reduce equipment break/fix expenses by 20%. App was showcased at 2014 McDonald’s Worldwide Convention and bought out by 3rd party in 2016. BUSINESS ANALYSIS: Defined functional requirements for new systems, features, and enhancements. Defined master data requirements and implemented process to enforce compliance across 16 global equipment suppliers. Worked closely with business clients, equipment suppliers, software architects, developers, and testers to define vision, build solutions, and implement tools in restaurants. UX DESIGN: Created screen mockups, defined user workflows, and designed responsive UI. Successfully validated user experience through user demos, interviews, and surveys.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

FINANCIAL MODELING: Managed global restaurant chargeback cost model and unique supplier relationship with McDonald’s Point of Sale software development company.CONTRACT NEGOTIATION: Negotiated and executed multiple strategic statements of work that moved onshore McDonald's IT Level 3 helpdesk support services to offshore provider. SOURCING: Led RFP process and negotiations for global IT service management tool that resulted in favorable SLAs, contract terms, and savings of 22%

Northbrook, Il, Us

MASTER AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS: Conducted master agreement contract negotiations with sole-sourced telephony supplier for enterprise-wide agreement that resulted in savings of $9MPROCUREMENT: Led procurement process and negotiations for in-building CDMA wireless solution that resulted in savings of $2.4MCOMPETITIVE BID EVENT: Conducted wireless RFP, online bid event, and contract negotiation that resulted in annual savings of $1.3MPromoted in under 2 yearsHired on as full time employee after college internship

Post Graduate Studies, Computer Science - Web & Internet Applications

Bachelor Of Business, Major: Supply Chain Management, Minor: Economics