Robbie Kohler
VP of Software Engineering, Byte by Yum!
Robbie Kohler is Vice President of Cloud Engineering at Byte by Yum!, a global SaaS platform powering digital experiences for brands like Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut. With a technology career spanning over two decades, Robbie has held roles from developer to architect to engineering executive across startups and Fortune 500 companies.
In 2018, Robbie led the development of one of the first enterprise-scale serverless architectures at Taco Bell, laying the foundation for modern cloud practices across the organization. His work has been featured in multiple episodes of AWS’s This Is My Architecture series, and he spoke at AWS re:Invent 2021 on building event-driven systems at scale. He also contributed a case study to the book Serverless Development on AWS: Building Enterprise-Scale Serverless Solutions by Sheen Brisals.
In his current role at Yum! Brands, Robbie focuses on building scalable cloud platforms that enable teams to move faster and operate more efficiently. He’s an AWS enthusiast and a pragmatic advocate for developer-friendly cloud solutions. Outside of work, Robbie enjoys playing guitar and spending time with his family.
Upcoming conference sessions featuring Robbie Kohler
Building Byte by Yum! on AWS – Tradeoffs, Primitives, and No Silver Bullets
Building a global restaurant SaaS platform to support tens of thousands of stores is hard. Doing it while enabling rapid innovation for iconic brands like Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger is even harder. Each brand and market has unique operational and customer needs, which means pure architectures often give way to real-world constraints: speed, cost, and team composition.
This talk is a behind-the-scenes look at how we built the Byte by Yum! platform using a pragmatic mix of AWS services: containers where it makes sense, serverless where it shines, and managed open source where we need control. We’ll show how we created a core platform that supports menu management, ordering, kitchen operations, and AI workflows, using domain primitives that enable rapid iteration and reduced time to market.
We’ll also explore how we delivered new products quickly using AWS services like EventBridge schedules, DynamoDB streams, and Express Step Functions – while achieving high availability, extreme scale, and cost efficiency.
This is a no-nonsense look at what it takes to build and evolve a global platform: the tradeoffs, the building blocks, and why there’s never a silver bullet.
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