Image provided by Yum! Brands.
With the belief that the future of the QSR industry will be determined by technology, Yum! Brands has been on a decade-long journey to set the bar for modern restaurant technology and digital experiences. As the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill, it’s hired some big names in digital, including Chief Digital & Technology Officer and President of Byte by Yum! Jim Dausch and Chief Data Officer Cameron Davies. The world’s largest restaurant company has also built an in-house tech stack, called Byte by Yum!, to help its operators run restaurants more efficiently.
Most recently, it’s upskilling its Digital & Technology teams through a flagship learning program called Tech Elevate. Now in its second year, the online-based, six-to-nine-week program offers nearly 300 participants the skills and tools they need to deepen their technical capabilities across Byte by Yum! and other critical technologies. Training topics include AI and machine learning, various programming languages, modern web development, site reliability engineering, and this year, AI platform engineering, Byte Menu and application programing interface (API) query languages.
“Tech Elevate reinforces Yum! Digital & Technology’s commitment to continuous learning and technical excellence,” said Pizza Hut Chief Technology & Information Officer and Tech Elevate Executive Sponsor Shiv Adhiappan. “What sets Tech Elevate apart is that it serves as a functional development program for software engineers and employees in adjacent roles, helping them strengthen technical skills and foster greater collaboration across Byte by Yum! teams and our brands.”
This commitment to personal development is a key component of the company’s culture, earning Yum! a reputation for being an incubator for future restaurant executives and repeatedly landing it on TIME’s Best Companies for Future Leaders list. Through Tech Elevate, engineers and technical team members are provided intentional time and space to build skills that directly support platform scalability, reliability and innovation.
Nearly 300 employees signed up to participate in the current iteration, which allowed participants to choose from one of three programs tracts. The first option, “AI-First Platform & Reliability Engineering,” gave Yum! engineers hands-on experience using agentic AI to deploy services, investigate failures and explore self-healing workflows. By combining site reliability engineering, platform engineering, and observability practices with emerging AI tools, the course helped engineers learn how to incorporate agentic AI into day-to-day engineering tasks while designing systems that are more resilient, scalable and easier to support.
The next course was “Foundations of Byte Menu.” This course explained the fundamental building blocks that make up the Byte by Yum!’s digital menu system. By mastering these components, participants gained the skills to architect a complete menu from scratch.
The final course offering was around the execution, federation and best practices of API query languages, which is a set of rules and protocols that enable software applications to communicate and share data. This course provided a deep, practical understanding of a production-grade API platform, not just a query language. By the end of the course, engineers were equipped to design, implement and evolve API query languages that are resilient, scalable and aligned with organizational standards.
“The AI-First Platform and Reliability Engineering course was extremely practical and immediately applicable to my day-to-day work,” said KFC U.S. Saurabh Sundriyal, senior software engineer II and engineering team lead. “I used the learnings right away to enhance application logging and built dashboards using large language models, improving visibility and operational efficiency for my team at KFC U.S.”
As the restaurant industry and technology evolve, Yum! Brands continues to invest in its people to ensure it remains a digital leader in QSR. Programs like Tech Elevate give teams the opportunity to build and sharpen the critical skills needed to develop industry-leading technology that creates better team member and customer experiences.
“As our technology stack evolves and scales globally, our teams must grow alongside it,” said Adhiappan. “This long-term investment in our people will ensure that we have the skills, confidence and discipline to continue to grow our brands.”
