Finished my loop for a senior SWE role at McDonald's Global Technology (the Chicago HQ tech org) a couple weeks ago. Got the offer so I can share freely.
For context: McDonald's corporate has a legit engineering org. This is not running the fry machine. They're building mobile ordering, loyalty platforms, restaurant management systems at massive scale. Billions of transactions. Real infra problems.
The process, in order: Recruiter phone screen (30 min) Technical phone screen with a senior engineer (45 min, one LeetCode-style coding problem) Onsite loop: 4 rounds over two days (I did one virtual day, one in-person Chicago) System design (60 min) Coding round 2 (45 min) Behavioral x2 (45 min each, two different panels)
Total time from application to offer: about 5.5 weeks. Recruiter was responsive, which I wasn't expecting. Debrief came back in 8 business days.
What they care about: Scale. Like, McDonald's serves 70 million customers a day and their apps need to not fall over at lunchtime. The system design round spent a lot of time on reliability, caching strategies, and graceful degradation. The interviewer asked how I'd handle a mobile ordering spike on a New Year's Eve. Real scenario, not contrived.
Coding questions were LeetCode medium, one medium-hard. No graph weirdness, but you should know trees, heaps, and sliding window cold.
For senior SWE the behavioral bar was higher than I expected. They're not just checking boxes. Two full 45-minute sessions. More on that in the behavioral post.
Stack is largely Java/Spring on the backend, React on the frontend, Azure infra. They mentioned Kotlin in some newer services. Worth knowing if you're coming from a Java background.
Happy to answer specifics if you're in the pipeline.