Software Engineer IV

W.W. Grainger • Chicago, IL

106d • $131,200 - $218,700

About The Position

Are you passionate about scaling engineering excellence and enabling teams to build faster, better, and more reliably? As a Senior Staff Software Engineer in our Engineering Effectiveness team, you'll be at the center of Grainger's mission to elevate developer experience across the organization. You'll drive architectural decisions, evolve platform tooling, and lead high-impact engagements across domains to enhance system resilience, scalability, and developer productivity. This role isn't about maintaining the status quo. It's about influencing the future of engineering at Grainger—from core infrastructure to how our teams design, build, and ship software every day.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience with software engineering in a large and distributed environment working across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated engineering empathy with a passion for pair programming, effectively supporting engineers at all skill levels by meeting them where they are in their learning journey.
• Cloud exposure (AWS / GCP / Azure) from the UI, API and CLI.
• Experience implementing infrastructure as code and automation.
• Knowledge of cloud-native event-driven microservices-based architectures including operational concerns such as performance, resiliency, observability, monitoring, discovery, and routing. (Kafka / AWS SQS)
• Experience with CI/CD principles and industry best practices to help drive the organizational culture and raise the bar on software delivery.
• Good understanding of building and operationalizing containerized workloads at scale (Docker / Kubernetes), APIs, and web services.
• Experience as a full stack engineer with emphasis on Java, React and NextJS.
• Experience tuning the performance, throughput and capacity of large-scale systems.
• Knowledge of common DevOps tools such as Ansible, GitHub, Terraform, etc.
• Experience using observability, monitoring and alerting frameworks and tooling (OTEL, DataDog / Dynatrace / Splunk).
• Experience with Atlassian products such as Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.
• Bachelors' degree in Engineering / Computer Science / Information Technology, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent work experience.

Responsibilities

• Engage with Product Engineers and engineers across the organization to deeply understand how we can achieve a frictionless and joyful experience that drives systemic change in Grainger's ability to deliver.
• Build partnerships with other shared services organizations such as SRE and Security to understand friction points across the organization.
• Collaborate with the Engineering Enablement Team to design and deliver impactful consulting sessions and immersive 'dojo' experiences that empower product engineering teams.
• Partner in AI Enablement, understand challenges faced by product teams and how AI can be a tool towards solving those challenges.
• Serve as a subject matter expert by providing hands-on development support during embedded engineering engagements, guiding product teams through all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
• Partner with the Delivery Insights Team to generate impactful insights that enhance engineering excellence and provide data-driven enablement strategies.
• Collaborate with the Core Engineering Team to advance our Internal Developer Portal (IDP), evolve our software templates, and drive the adoption of our shared workflows.
• Help shape and drive our overall Developer Experience (DevEx).

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: Merchant Wholesalers, Durable Goods
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree