Director, Product Engineering

About Grainger:
Grainger is a leading broad line distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom. We achieve our purpose, We Keep the World Working®, by serving more than 4.5 million customers with a wide range of products that keep their operations running and their people safe. Grainger also delivers services and solutions, such as technical support and inventory management, to save customers time and money.
We're looking for passionate people who can move our company forward. As one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, we have a welcoming workplace where you can build a career for yourself while fulfilling our purpose to keep the world working. We embrace new ways of thinking and recognize everyone is an individual. Find your way with Grainger today.
Position Details:
The Director of Engineering in Search is an engineering leader for people, process, and delivery management. You have a search background and can guide creation and priority of features and capabilities through leadership, execution, facilitating communication, and understanding the boundaries of their specific domain applying their technical mindset. You will report to the Sr. director of Product Engineering. This is a hybrid position based in our Chicago office.
You Will:

• You will manage a team of Senior Engineering Managers and Engineering Managers.
• You will provide direction for Search with a focus on the engineering aspects such as technical dependencies on product and category services, interactions with data science teams and services that provide user search intention and suggestions, architectural agreement for modernized search, and maturing the Agile processes driving the Search teams.

Domain responsibilities:

• Feature prioritization and delivery: You will lead multiple Search development teams that build search capabilities for Grainger.com and company partners using search.
• Modern Engineering and Cloud Technologies: Promote and embed skills that allow the use of the cloud, containers, serverless, and the use of test automation.
• Product and Architecture Agreement: The Director will ensure that there are regular agreement/backlog refinement sessions for the work coming into the domain. These meetings will provide ongoing structure to maintain connection between Engineering, Architecture, Data Science and Product.

Domain Delivery:

• The Director will remain aware of timelines, commitments, and forecasts of large deliverables. Working with the Product group and their engineering managers, they will try to correct any people issues with the delivery of work and make sure that the teams within their domain have the support, skills, and tools required to deliver high-quality software. Software Development Process Improvement: It is the charge of the Director to ensure that their Engineering Managers are agents to nurture a culture of continuous improvement for engineers, teams, and even the managers themselves. You will also work with the Director of Engineering Effectiveness and Technical SMEs to create upskilling programs when needed.
• Facilitate agreement: It is important that the teams, tech leads, product management, data science team and architects always stay in agreement.
• Search health: The Director will monitor the health of not just a single team, but the entire domain. Using metrics to watch trends and reveal antipatterns, the Director will support Engineering Managers when the need arises for Performance Management, but the Director should mostly be concerned with how the health of the Search system is performing, as a team.
• Domain modeling: If the need arises to evaluate the boundaries that exist within the domain, the Director is participant in the conversation. Help Grainger make the best possible choices with any such moves.

Team responsibilities:

• Personnel Management: The Director directly manages a group of Engineering Managers and is indirectly responsible for all the engineering teams under those managers. Issue of team personnel could require their attention or their direct intervention.
• Built-in Quality: The Director will monitor quality metrics (Ex. Escaped Defects, Mean Time to Resolution) to ensure that the Engineering Managers are encouraging a culture that places heavy emphasis on building quality into the software that is written. Using methods like Test-driven Development, the Director should help to create a system for teams to deliver their best work.
• Lifecycle Management: The Director will oversee the health and efficiency of the SDLC for their domain. You should work with all departments, teams, and individuals to ensure the methods of software delivery is smooth and that all operational expenses are providing the desired outcomes.
• Technology Champion: The Director will be an advocate for the technology that the teams in their domain create. While the Director is not directly responsible for the design decisions that the teams make, they should always be aware of the outcomes, challenges, and choices the teams are facing.

You Have:

• 5 to 7 years of people management experience
• 5+ years of demonstrated experience in SLDC using Agile methodologies, continuous delivery, cloud and modern engineering approaches to solve business problems
• Online Search experience how Search Engines and data science work together to delivery high relevant search results.
• Demonstrated experience working with data science teams in consuming services and providing data pipelines to build machine learning models
• Requires a bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems or a related study or equivalent project-related experience.

Rewards and Benefits:
With benefits starting day one, Grainger is committed to your safety, health and wellbeing. Our programs provide choice to meet our team members' individual needs. Check out some of the rewards available to you at Grainger.

• Benefits starting on day one, including medical, dental vision and life insurance
• 6% 401(k) company contribution each pay period with no personal contribution required
• Employee discounts, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing, free access to financial counseling, education and more.

DEI Statement
We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
We are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible environment that includes both providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process as well as throughout the course of one's employment. With this in mind, should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.
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