Software Engineer IV

• Medical dental vision and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment and 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist to support your emotional wellbeing.
• 18 paid time off (PTO) days annually for full-time employees (accrual prorated based on employment start date) and 6 company holidays per year.
• 6% company contribution to a 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan each pay period no employee contribution required.
• Employee discounts tuition reimbursement student loan refinancing and free access to financial counseling education and tools.
• Maternity support programs nursing benefits and up to 14 weeks paid leave for birth parents and up to 4 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents.

• Lead engineer on a team responsible for the application and delivery of high-quality maintainable software for highly complex applications
• Influence team adoption of sensible defaults to enable continuous delivery activities
• Contribute to continuous learning on your team culture by leading knowledge sharing sessions with latest technological features and engineering practices
• Maintain software in production with demonstrated ability to triage and resolve issues
• Mentor developers conduct code reviews and participate in pair programming
• Partners directly with IT Management team to ensure successful design and delivery of technology based solutions
• Design build and improve search systems using lexical (e.g. BM25/TF-IDF) and semantic/vector-based retrieval approaches.
• Develop and optimize ranking strategies including hybrid retrieval reranking and learning-to-rank techniques to improve relevance.
• Build and maintain indexing pipelines including document processing schema design and data freshness.
• Evaluate search quality using offline metrics (e.g. NDCG MRR Precision/Recall) and online experiments (A/B testing).
• Analyze search performance identify relevance issues and implement improvements such as query understanding intent handling and fallback strategies.
• Tune precision/recall tradeoffs and implement query expansion techniques (e.g. synonyms spell correction query relaxation).
• Contribute to production search systems including logging monitoring scalability and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define requirements success metrics and deliver continuous improvements.

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years experience as a Software Engineer; with experience in modern software engineering; designing; devloping testing and deploying scalable software applications within a variety of technologies and environments.
• 3+ years hands on SOLR/Lucene search relevance work (BM25/TF IDF) schema/analyzers query parsers and SolrCloud operations
• 5+ years building and shipping hybrid lexical + vector search systems end to end (embeddings ANN indexing hybrid scoring rollout monitoring)
• Experience with pipeline/orchestration tools for embeddings & index refresh (e.g. Airflow/Spark) and integration of behavioral signals (click/carts) into relevance features or LTR
• Expert knowledge of programming skills
• Demonstrated knowledge of distributed system design and integration patterns
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and Dev Ops Practices
• Experience with analyzing interpreting and communicating complex problems and practices

• Expert knowledge of programming skills
• Demonstrated knowledge of distributed system design and integration patterns
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and Dev Ops Practices
• Experience with analyzing interpreting and communicating complex problems and practices
• Understanding of IR fundamentals (BM25/TF-IDF tokenization analyzers normalization synonyms) and when lexical vs. semantic approaches are most effective; ability to design hybrid ranking strategies and relevance guardrails at scale.
• Proficiency in embeddings ANN methods (e.g. HNSW) and hybrid search design including tradeoffs between recall latency and ranking quality as well as reranking and learning-to-rank approaches.
• Experience with search platforms (e.g. Solr/Lucene) including distributed architecture (sharding replication) indexing query routing caching and relevance tuning; solid programming skills in Java and Python.
• Expertise in relevance metrics (NDCG MRR Precision/Recall) and business KPIs; ability to design experiments build dashboards and make data-informed tradeoffs across precision recall and user impact.
• Ability to communicate c omplex IR/ML concepts to diverse audiences influence stakeholders with data and operate effectively within modern engineering practices (Agile CI/CD code reviews incident management).

What We Do

Grainger is a leading broad line distributor with operations primarily in North America and Japan. We Keep The World Working® by serving more than 4.6 million customers worldwide with products delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. We’re dedicated to providing value for customers fostering an engaging culture for team members and driving strong financial results. Our welcoming workplace enables you to learn grow and make a difference by keeping businesses running and their people safe. As a Platinum Employer on the Where You Work Matters list a 2026 Glassdoor Best Place to Work and a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company we’re looking for passionate people to join our team as we continue leading the industry. Find your way with Grainger at jobs.grainger.com.

Why Work With Us

We're proud of our people-focused culture. We embrace new ways of thinking and recognize everyone as an individual. At Grainger we have a welcoming workplace where you can fell comfortable confident and learn and grow at any career stage all while fulfilling our purpose to keep the world working.

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