One architecture, five national brands

Context

From 2021, the integrations organization took on the portfolio of one of America's largest restaurant groups: a sandwich chain, a drive-in classic, a coffee-and-donuts giant, its wings-and-sports-bar sister brand, and more — spread across Brink, Oracle Simphony, NCR Aloha, and a custom digital layer. I guided the team that built the enterprise pipeline that made this a single engineering problem instead of five.

Challenge

Every brand had its own POS platform, menu structure, and rollout politics — but the group expected portfolio-wide consistency: the same onboarding experience, the same limited-time-offer (LTO) mechanics, the same reliability. Menu changes had to propagate across thousands of stores at once, and the early infrastructure showed its limits when brand-wide LTO runs stretched to nine hours.

Approach

• My team built the multi-brand enterprise menu pipeline: bulk menu ingestion, brand-specific POS mapping, batch imports, and coordinated LTO runs across thousands of locations in a single pass.
• Under my guidance, the team identified the database bottleneck behind the nine-hour LTO runs and drove the RDS infrastructure upgrade that enabled concurrent multi-brand runs at significantly reduced processing times.
• Spearheaded the Bulk Scheduler, the internal tool the operations team uses daily to run brand-wide menu changes across three national brands.
• Sequenced the launches: the sandwich chain on Brink (the largest launch in company history), a conversion for the drive-in brand on its custom digital layer, then the coffee-and-donuts giant (Oracle Simphony) and its wings sister brand (NCR Aloha).

Key decisions

• One pipeline, brand-specific mapping at the edges — the architecture absorbed POS differences in the mapping layer, so every new brand strengthened shared infrastructure instead of forking it.
• Fix the platform before the next launch, not after — the RDS upgrade was scheduled off the back of LTO pain, so the record-setting launches landed on infrastructure that could hold them.
• First-party too — the same architecture powers the group's first-party delivery channels alongside the third-party marketplaces, doubling the return on every pipeline improvement.

Outcomes

Five national brands live on delivery channels through one architecture, the largest launch in company history delivered without a rebuild, and menu-change infrastructure the operations team still runs daily.