Director, Product Engineering

W.W. Grainger-posted 5 months ago

$176,300 - $293,800/Yr

Full-time • Senior

Hybrid • Chicago, IL

5,001-10,000 employees

Merchant Wholesalers, Durable Goods

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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 Chicago Offices.

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.

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

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.

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