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🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.
RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem. ⬇️ SEE EXAMPLE ⬇️
HARRY’S TEARDOWN: Whataburger is looking for a Sr. Director of Digital to lead the strategy, performance, and evolution of its end-to-end digital commerce ecosystem — from first-party ordering across web, mobile app, and kiosks, to third-party marketplace management on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Favor, to the loyalty platform that ties the entire digital customer relationship together.
Whataburger was founded in 1950 in Corpus Christi, Texas by a man named Harmon Dobson, who had one goal: make a burger so big it takes two hands to hold. Seventy-five years later, Whataburger is an approximately $4.12 billion system-sales business operating more than 1,100 restaurants (1,180 locations as of February 2026) across 17 states.
They’re the #7 burger chain in America by sales — but here’s the part that should get your attention: their average unit volume (AUV) surpassed $4 million per store in 2024. That’s higher than McDonald’s (~$3.96M AUV), which operates roughly 13,600 locations and is arguably the most operationally optimized fast-food company in history.
Whataburger does it with a made-to-order, 24-hours-a-day model that is inherently less efficient than a McDonald’s assembly line — which means the AUV premium is being driven by extraordinary brand loyalty and customer frequency, not operational shortcuts.
In 2019, BDT Capital Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners) acquired a majority stake from the Dobson family, which had owned the company for 69 years. Since then, Whataburger has been in quiet transformation mode.
Check out this very positive 2022 video, “The Rise and Fall … and Rise Again of Whataburger”
The entire C-suite has been rebuilt in the last 24 months with leadership imported from McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Dunkin’: CEO Debbie Stroud (27 years at McDonald’s, 5 years as Starbucks SVP of US Retail Ops), CMO Scott Hudler (11 years at Dunkin’ where he built their digital loyalty and mobile ordering infrastructure), and EVP, Chief Digital and Technology Transformation Officer Rohit Kapoor (Starbucks tech, Pizza Hut International, Yum!, Claire’s CIO). This is a deliberate, PE-backed play to take a beloved regional brand and scale it nationally — with digital as the tip of the spear.
System sales grew 9.4% in 2024. That made Whataburger one of only three burger chains in America (alongside In-N-Out at ~11.5% and Culver’s at ~15.5%) to grow sales more than 2% that year. The company has expanded from roughly 900-1,000 locations a few years ago to over 1,100 today (1,180 as of February 2026) — adding presence in states including North Carolina, Colorado, Indiana, and Kentucky.
A 2026 NetCredit study named Whataburger the best-value burger in America, outperforming McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Culver’s on meat-per-ounce metrics.
But here’s the opportunity — and it’s the reason this role exists.
Whataburger’s digital infrastructure is playing catch-up to its brand power. Paid search accounts for just 2.33% of site traffic vs. a 10%+ category average. In Texas, that’s fine — 39% of web traffic comes from direct brand searches because the loyalty runs so deep that people type “whataburger.com” without thinking. But in North Carolina and Indiana, that kind of organic demand is still developing.
The loyalty program was relaunched in 2023 and has grown significantly since — but Chick-fil-A’s One program has 50 million+ members on a comparable revenue base. There’s a substantial loyalty scaling opportunity sitting right there. And digital sales as a percentage of system revenue? Whataburger doesn’t even disclose it publicly — which suggests the number is early-stage enough to be a massive growth lever.
The person who takes this role will own the digital P&L across all ordering channels, the loyalty platform strategy (member frequency, retention, growth), the third-party marketplace relationships and optimization, and the experimentation engine that ties it all together. You’ll report to Rohit Kapoor, a deeply credible technology executive who was brought in specifically to lead the modernization of Whataburger’s digital and technology infrastructure.
The tech stack is already in motion: Braze for CRM and marketing automation, SoundHound’s Houndify AI for voice-driven drive-thru ordering, Radar for location-based ETA and mobile order fulfillment, and a Digital Kitchen prototype in Bee Cave, TX that is cashless, app-only, and achieves high rates of customer authentication with location tracking and loyalty enrollment. That Digital Kitchen is a data acquisition machine disguised as a restaurant — and scaling it to dense urban markets is part of the strategic playbook.
Who is Whataburger’s customer?
They’re a 25-44-year-old, middle-income, value-oriented American — predominantly in the South and Southwest — who views the brand as an identity statement, not just a meal. CivicScience data shows Whataburger fans are 40% more likely to research a brand’s stance on social issues and over-index for novelty-seeking. They’re emotion-first buyers who rationalize with logic.
That means the digital experience isn’t just a convenience layer — it’s a relationship management tool that must feel as authentic and personal as the in-store experience. Get that wrong, and you erode the emotional contract that drives the $4M+ AUV.
One more thing: Whataburger’s retail condiment business — 15 SKUs, 5,000+ grocery stores, 25+ states, 21 distribution partners — has grown over 500% since 2013. Their Fancy Ketchup and Spicy Ketchup have been cited as among the fastest-growing ketchup brands in the nation.
Every bottle of Whataburger ketchup on a grocery shelf in North Carolina is a low-cost brand awareness vehicle that arrives before the first restaurant even opens. The Sr. Director who figures out how to connect that grocery distribution data to a digital loyalty acquisition funnel will have built something truly defensible.
🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™
ABOUT THE ROLE
Whataburger is hiring a Sr. Director of Digital to own the digital commerce ecosystem across an approximately $4.12 billion, 1,100+ location QSR platform expanding across 17 states. Your mission will be to:
- Scale the loyalty program from early maturity into a national retention engine that drives member frequency and lifetime value,
- Build and optimize the omnichannel ordering roadmap across first-party (web, app, kiosk) and third-party (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Favor) channels, and
- Install the experimentation and measurement infrastructure required to prove digital’s contribution to system-level revenue growth.
This role is based at the San Antonio Home Office (Monday-Thursday onsite, remote Fridays) and reports to EVP, Chief Digital and Technology Transformation Officer Rohit Kapoor.
THIS IS NOT A TURNAROUND. This is a scale-up — the brand and the customer demand are already proven. What’s needed is a digital operator who can build the systems, teams, and measurement discipline to convert that demand into a digital-first growth engine.
A final note (this is where the best candidates may separate themselves in the interview) …
The winning hire will not treat AI as a checkbox or a content-generation toy. They will use it to close the gap between Whataburger’s brand demand and its digital output, starting on day one. That means: building a personal evaluation set of 15–20 real Whataburger tasks (loyalty offer drafts, DoorDash menu rewrites, Charlotte digital-mix diagnostics, Braze segment QA) that you re-run against every new model release so you always know which tool to point at which problem.
It means routing tasks to the right model tier instead of paying top-tier prices for cleanup work — reasoning models for offer ideation and contribution-margin analysis, mid-tier models for high-volume copy and segment generation, lightweight models for proofing and classification. It means standing up a shared prompt library, a versioned evaluation harness, and an internal agent layer your team can run without re-engineering prompts every Monday morning. Infrastructure, not subscriptions.
The second move is bigger, and it’s the one almost nobody in QSR is doing yet.
Before you touch the product roadmap, run a tribal-knowledge audit on the top 10 menu items and the top 5 loyalty offers — the 80% of what sells Whataburger that lives in marketing copy, packaging, crew knowledge, and regional lore instead of a structured data field. Encode it into machine-readable schemas.
Do the same for the 15 grocery SKUs and the geographic purchase data behind them, so condiment buyers in North Carolina become a pre-qualified loyalty acquisition list before the first new store opens in their zip code. Treat the Bee Cave Digital Kitchen as a data factory first and a restaurant second — get its authenticated customer data into Braze and into a warehouse your team can query in plain English, and use it to calibrate every personalization test you run across the other 1,100+ locations.
The chain that makes its menu, loyalty, and condiment catalog agent-readable in the next 24 months will own the AI-ordering land grab in QSR. McDonald’s is too big to move that fast. Chick-fil-A hasn’t started. You can.
🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™
Areas of Oversight
Digital Commerce Strategy & Omnichannel Ordering
- Lead the end-to-end product vision and growth strategy for Whataburger’s digital commerce ecosystem, spanning first-party ordering (mobile app, web, in-store kiosks) and third-party marketplace channels (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Favor), ensuring each channel contributes to a unified customer data model and consistent brand experience.
- Own the digital commerce roadmap — including feature prioritization, release cadence, and cross-platform capability sequencing — balancing guest experience quality, operational feasibility across 1,100+ locations, and measurable business performance (conversion rate, digital mix, AOV).
- Drive the strategy for scaling the Digital Kitchen concept (cashless, app-only, food-locker format) into dense urban and non-traditional markets, leveraging high customer authentication rates as a data acquisition and personalization flywheel.
- Collaborate with Rohit Kapoor’s technology team on SoundHound AI voice ordering deployment strategy, ensuring AI-driven drive-thru ordering is sequenced to maximize upsell lift and labor efficiency across the highest-volume locations first.
Loyalty Program Ownership & Retention Architecture
- Own the full roadmap and business performance of Whataburger’s loyalty platform, with specific accountability for member acquisition rate, active member frequency, redemption-driven incremental visits, and member-level LTV growth.
- Design and execute loyalty scaling strategies for new-market expansion states (North Carolina, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky) where organic brand demand is still developing — building geo-targeted digital acquisition funnels that seed loyalty enrollment ahead of and alongside new store openings.
- Architect the loyalty offer testing cadence — including tiered rewards, gamification mechanics (building on the existing Braze-powered loyalty infrastructure), subscription-style visit incentives, and pause/reactivation flows — to reduce voluntary churn and increase annual spend per member.
- Partner with the CMO’s marketing team to connect grocery retail distribution data (15 SKUs in 5,000+ stores) with digital loyalty targeting — using condiment purchase geography as a signal for acquisition spending in pre-restaurant markets.
Third-Party Marketplace & Delivery Optimization
- Oversee the third-party marketplace strategy across DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Favor — including partner negotiations, pricing architecture, promotional calendar, marketing co-investment, and operational quality standards for delivery orders.
- Build and manage a marketplace contribution margin model that tracks true profitability per channel, per geography, per daypart — moving beyond top-line GMV reporting to identify which marketplace investments actually drive incremental revenue vs. cannibalize first-party.
- Ensure delivery order accuracy and speed-of-fulfillment standards are maintained as marketplace volume scales, collaborating with Operations to embed digital order execution quality into store-level KPI dashboards.
Experimentation, Measurement & Digital KPIs
- Champion a test-and-learn culture across all digital platforms — installing the experimentation velocity, hypothesis documentation, and statistical rigor required to move from ad-hoc A/B tests to a systematic optimization engine running 10+ concurrent experiments per month across loyalty offers, app UX, menu positioning, and checkout flow.
- Own digital KPIs including conversion rate, order frequency, digital mix (% of total transactions), marketplace contribution, order accuracy, speed-to-pickup, and guest satisfaction — with clear reporting cadence to the EVP and cross-functional leadership.
- Build the measurement infrastructure to accurately attribute digital’s contribution to system-level revenue growth — closing the current data gap where digital sales as a percentage of system revenue is not publicly tracked or disclosed.
Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Alignment
- Build, lead, and coach a high-performing digital commerce team with clear KPIs, decision frameworks, and strong accountability — creating the operating cadence required for a function that must coordinate across Technology, Operations, Marketing, and external partners in a 1,100+ location environment.
- Collaborate cross-functionally to align digital capabilities with restaurant operations, ensuring that digital ordering innovation (kiosk rollouts, mobile order-ahead, delivery integration) is scalable, operationally sound, and consistent across both company-owned and franchised units.
- Serve as the organizational bridge between Kapoor’s technology team and Hudler’s marketing team — translating technical platform capabilities into customer-facing growth strategies and ensuring digital product development is informed by real customer behavior data, not assumptions.
🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™
Qualifications
EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION
- Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, computer science, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience that demonstrates the same depth of strategic and analytical capability.
FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES — SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE
- 10+ years of progressive experience in digital commerce, loyalty program management, or ecommerce leadership roles — with demonstrated P&L or KPI accountability for a digital business of meaningful scale.
- Proven track record owning both first-party and third-party commerce performance — you’ve managed an owned digital ordering platform (app, web) AND marketplace channel strategy (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, or similar) simultaneously, and you understand the contribution margin math of each.
- Deep experience scaling a loyalty platform — not just managing one. You’ve driven measurable growth in member acquisition, active member frequency, retention, and member-level LTV. Bonus if you’ve built gamification mechanics, tiered reward structures, or subscription-style visit incentives.
- Experience operating in high-growth, multi-location, transformation environments — QSR, fast-casual, retail, hospitality, or similarly high-volume businesses where digital must work at 500+ locations, not just in a test market.
- Strong expertise in omnichannel product management — you think in roadmaps, release cadences, and cross-platform capability sequencing, not just campaigns.
- Hands-on comfort with experimentation and optimization frameworks — you’ve run A/B and multivariate tests at scale, you understand statistical significance and sample size math, and you’ve built an experimentation program (not just participated in one).
- Analytical fluency across digital commerce KPIs — conversion rate, frequency, digital mix, AOV, LTV, CAC, marketplace contribution margin, order accuracy, and NPS are second nature. You build dashboards, not just read them.
- Experience with API-driven architectures, digital ordering platforms, or CRM/marketing automation systems (Braze, Salesforce, Klaviyo, or similar) is a strong plus.
- AI tool fluency applied to business outcomes — you use AI to move faster, analyze deeper, and ship better, not as a checkbox. You can articulate how AI-assisted workflows (whether in content, personalization, analytics, or operational automation) create compounding value, not just one-off efficiency gains. (Nice-to-have, but increasingly non-negotiable at this level.)
LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES
- Demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing teams in a fast-paced, multi-stakeholder environment — setting clear KPIs, creating decision frameworks, and holding people accountable while developing their careers.
- Proven ability to influence cross-functional leaders at the SVP/C-suite level — you communicate with clarity, lead with data, and know how to make a business case that gets budget approved, not just heads nodding.
- Experience navigating complex organizational dynamics — especially in environments where the digital function must coordinate across Operations, Technology, Marketing, and external partners who don’t all report to the same person.
- Comfort leading through ambiguity in a transformation environment — you don’t wait for perfect information or a fully-baked strategy to start making progress. You build the plane while you fly it, but you build it well.
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
- High integrity and transparency — you say what you mean, own your mistakes, and operate with the kind of intellectual honesty that earns trust from peers, direct reports, and executives alike.
- Self-directed and proactive — you don’t wait to be told what to do. You see the gap, build the case, and move.
- Resilient under pressure — this is a ~$4 billion brand in active transformation with a new leadership team, a national expansion underway, and a digital function that needs to scale faster than the org is used to moving. You need the fortitude to push through organizational resistance without burning bridges.
- Deeply curious about the customer — you spend time in the app, in the drive-thru, reading reviews, and talking to real customers. Your instincts are calibrated by direct observation, not just dashboards.
- Comfortable operating at the intersection of brand and commerce — you understand that Whataburger’s digital experience must feel as authentic as the in-store experience, and you have the taste level to protect the emotional contract while optimizing the conversion funnel.
- Entrepreneurial orientation — you think like an owner, not a renter. You care about contribution margin, not just traffic metrics.
- Strong written and verbal communicator — you can write a compelling strategy memo, present to the C-suite, and explain a complex technical trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder without losing anyone in the room.
🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.
RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem.
To apply for this job please visit careers.whataburger.com.
