Sr. Lead Engineer, Operational Feasibility Consulting - Chick-fil-A, Inc.
Atlanta, GA
About the Job
Overview
The Production Design Group within Chick-fil-A, Inc. focuses on engineering revolutionary restaurant system solutions that Operators, Team Members, and Customers love for 3,000+ restaurants.
The Senior Lead Engineer in the Industrial & Systems Engineering group of Production Design provides Operational consulting to cross-functional stakeholders who drive new menu or packaging items and new food-production equipment, systems, and process projects from conception to implementation. This engineer is specifically tasked with developing and influencing solutions to increase the production capacity of restaurants and decrease complexity, labor, or ergonomic risk for Team Members.
This engineer needs to be skilled and confident influencing and communicating to cross-functional partners at all levels of the organization. A chief contribution will be to utilize disciplined principles of engineering analysis, problem-solving, and innovative design. Position must be able to understand current state-of-the art food-industry equipment designs and apply innovative, forward-thinking design initiative prior to the need being explicitly stated or identified.
Our Flexible Future model offers a healthy mix of working in person and virtually, strengthening key elements of the Chick-fil-A culture by fostering collaboration and community.
Responsibilities
- Provide SME to Menu, Packaging, Supply Chain, and other parts of the business needing restaurant Operational Feasibility and process insight
- Support a variety of projects with wide latitude for unreviewed action and decisions on outcomes. This includes what and how work is done, prioritization of competing priorities, and directing internal and external partners.
- Influence partners across multiple departments to direct large, high-impact programs related to restaurant capacity and complexity improvement.
- Partner with higher level leadership in other departments, including Menu & Packaging, Food Safety, Culinary/Commercialization, Field Ops, Quality & Lean, and Enterprise Analytics, to craft strategy and ensure alignment.
- Identify barriers, bottlenecks, and pain points to continued profitable growth, prioritize problems to solve, and imagine robust solutions to meet business objectives.
- Lead collaboration with cross-functional teams to ensure that projects meet all business needs and are successfully executed within constraints
- Communicate well with and influence non-technical business disciplines through the explanation and adoption of operational consulting.
- Serve multiple up and downstream partners to accomplish goals of varied stakeholders.
- Leverage skills as an individual contributor and in a technical leadership capacity.
- Align strategy and work output with various cross-functional disciplines including, but not limited to, other teams within Production Design, Restaurant Development, Supply Chain, Kitchen Design, Culinary Commercialization, and Field Ops
- Influence strategic direction by providing input that may directly impact specific programs or areas of the business that may have broader impact across the organization.
- Possess and apply more advanced knowledge of particular field of specialization to the completion of projects and/or outcomes of major complexity
- Represent the organization in outside discussions and technical forums
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree
- 5-8 years of engineering experience
- Proven ability to provide technical leadership to stakeholders
- Ability to work with wide latitude for unreviewed action or decision on outcomes
- Advanced project management skills demonstrated
- Excellent communication, relational, and team skills to enable interaction with restaurant team members, as well as corporate peers and leaders
- Knowledge to produce and maintain technical specification documents on both process and equipment improvement opportunities
- Experience leading cross-functional teams that include both technical and non-technical aptitudes
- Experience with and an aptitude toward work involving applied research to explore and define technically vague concepts with the ability to apply them to executable projects
- Proficiency in MS Office products (Excel, Word, PowerPoint)
- Proficiency in Food Safety
Preferred Qualifications
- Master's Degree in Engineering Discipline
- Educational background in Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, or similar discipline
- 10+ years of engineering experience with high interpersonal skills
- Previous experience working in a Chick-fil-A Restaurant
- Proficiency in Chick-fil-A Pathway Procedures and Quality Requirements