Grainger is seeking a Director of Product Engineering to lead their Search organization, responsible for the intelligence powering discovery across Grainger's digital experiences, serving millions of customers and supporting billions in revenue.
Requirements
- 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.
- 7+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers.
- 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.
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.
- Strengthen agile practices, engineering quality, observability, and operational rigor.
- Champion DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native best practices (containers, serverless, IaC, etc.).
Other
- 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.
