Director, Product Engineering

Work Location Type: Hybrid

About Grainger:

W.W. Grainger, Inc., is a leading broad line distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom. At Grainger, We Keep the World Working® by serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide with products and solutions delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. Known for its commitment to service and award-winning culture, the Company had 2024 revenue of $17.2 billion across its two business models. In the High-Touch Solutions segment, Grainger offers approximately 2 million maintenances, repair and operating (MRO) products and services, including technical support and inventory management. In the Endless Assortment segment,  Zoro.com offers customers access to more than 14 million products, and MonotaRO.com offers more than 24 million products. For more information, visit  . 

Compensation

The anticipated base pay compensation range for this position is $176,300.00 to $293,800.00.

Rewards and Benefits:

With benefits starting on day one, our programs provide choice and flexibility to meet team members' individual needs, including:

• 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.

For additional information and details regarding Grainger’s benefits, please click on the link below:

The pay range provided above is not a guarantee of compensation. The range reflects the potential base pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual base pay compensation will depend, in part, on factors such as geographic work location and relevant experience and skills.

The anticipated compensation range described above is subject to change and the compensation ultimately paid may be higher or lower than the range described above.

Grainger reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion at any time, consistent with applicable law.

Position Details:

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. D irector of Product Engineering. This is a hybrid role based in our Chicago Offices .

What You’ll Do :

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.

What You Bring

• 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).

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible work environment that includes both providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process as well as throughout the course of one’s employment, should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, including, but not limited to use of our website, any part of the application, interview or hiring process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.