Director, Product Engineering - Search

Grainger Businesses • Chicago, IL

11d • $176,300 - $293,800 • Hybrid

About The Position

We’re seeking a Director of Product Engineering to lead our Search organization — the team behind the intelligence that powers discovery across Grainger’s digital experiences. You’ll support a team of engineering managers, tech leads, and engineers focused on delivering best-in-class search capabilities that serve millions of customers and support billions in revenue. This is a highly collaborative leadership role that collaborates across engineering, product, architecture, and data science. You’ll bring a modern technical mindset, a people-first leadership approach, and a passion for building systems that scale. You will report to the Sr. Director of Product Engineering. This is a hybrid role based in our downtown Chicago Mart office.

Requirements

• 7+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers.
• Proven track record of leading teams that build and scale complex search or information retrieval systems.
• Deep experience with Agile, CI/CD, cloud platforms (ideally AWS), and modern software engineering practices.
• Strong product thinking and a bias for impact.
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and influence skills — especially across disciplines.
• A passion for people development and team health.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with ML-powered search or close partnership with data science teams (bonus: semantic search, vector retrieval, personalization).

Responsibilities

• Own the Search Engineering Domain: Lead multiple cross-functional teams responsible for powering search on Grainger.com and other digital touchpoints.
• Shape the roadmap in close partnership with Product, Architecture, and Data Science.
• Ensure Grainger’s search stack — from indexing to ranking to retrieval — is modern, resilient, and delivering measurable business impact.
• Champion a hybrid retrieval strategy that blends traditional techniques (e.g., Solr) with ML and semantic models.
• Lead and Develop Engineering Teams: Manage and mentor a group of Engineering Managers and Senior Managers.
• Build a strong, inclusive, and high-performing culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and technical excellence.
• Drive clear goals, accountability, and autonomy across teams.
• Support hiring, onboarding, career growth, and succession planning.
• Improve Systems and Execution: Strengthen agile practices, engineering quality, observability, and operational rigor.
• Use metrics to assess system health, delivery velocity, and customer outcomes.
• Partner with peers across the organization to remove blockers, align strategy, and prioritize wisely.
• Champion DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native best practices (containers, serverless, IaC, etc.).
• Operate as a Strategic Leader: Ensure strong alignment between engineering, product, data science, and architecture.
• Facilitate healthy tension, resolve ambiguity, and enable smart tradeoffs.
• Identify gaps in org design, domain boundaries, or team charters — and advocate for change.
• Represent the Search organization across engineering leadership and with executive stakeholders.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment
• 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)
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director