Director, Product Engineering

Work Location Type: Hybrid 

As a leading industrial distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom, We Keep The World Working® by serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide with products delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. With 2023 sales of $16.5 billion, we’re dedicated to providing value for customers, fostering an engaging culture for team members and driving strong financial results.

Our welcoming workplace enables you to learn, grow and make a difference by keeping businesses running and their people safe. As a 2024 Glassdoor Best Place to Work and a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company, we’re looking for passionate people to join our team as we continue leading the industry over our next 100 years.

Position Details: 

The Director of Engineering Effectiveness is an engineering leader that helps shape how we build technical solutions form a people, process, and delivery management perspective.  You have a passion for continuous improvement and share that passion across a diverse set of engineering organizations. You will understand how software is built with urgency, quality, resiliency and security and how to measure those outcomes. You will partner with engineering leaders across Product Engineering, Platform Engineering and Grainger Technology Group. 

You will report to the Sr. Director of Enablement and Platform Engineering. This position can be remote. 

You Will: 

You will provide direction for Engineering Effectiveness with a focus on understanding the developer experience, engineering best practices, engineering skill growth by combining a comprehensive understanding of the engineers themselves, our software delivery processes and the data on how workflows through the SDLC (software development lifecycle).  You will stay abreast of emerging trends in the industry and bring those innovations to Grainger through our communities of practices, presentations to all levels of the organization and publishing documents and articles. 

Organizational responsibilities:  

• Understand and advocate for responsive engineering practices that allow for both rapid deployment and frequent feature releases, while maintaining safety, security and quality 

• Lead the definition and evolution of engineering learning for Product and Platform engineering and GTG. 

• Support various engineering and engineering related communities of practice ensuring good practices and great ideas are shared between teams and domains.  This will be both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. 

• We regularly meet with Domain Leads to understand their current and further needs, supporting where possible and advocating for organizational-wide improvements. 

• Engineering Practice Leadership: Lead the definition and evolution of engineering for Product and Platform engineering and GTG.  Engineering Practices includes both software engineering and quality engineering.  Engineering Effectiveness will partner with other subject matter experts in infrastructure, cloud, security and resiliency to ensure a complete understanding of our needs. 

• Technical Coaching - Lead the development of immersive learning supported by hands on highly technical engineering and product coaches.  This will include dojos, labs, hands on learning, documentation and content, conference presentations and mentoring. 

• Delivery Insights – Continually evaluate industry best practices on measurement and its effect on engineering management.  Lead the definition of new insight generation, custom software and reporting and evaluate the efficacy of current measurement practices.  

• Developer Experience – Own the overall engineering experience, including our Developer Portal, templates and laptop tooling experience. 

• Stay aware of evolving industry best practices and capabilities, assess their usefulness to Grainger and collaborate on their introduction when applicable. 

• Modern Engineering and Cloud Technologies: Promote skills that allow the use of the cloud, containers, serverless, and the use of test automation. 

• Participate in the overall definition of our Secure Software Delivery Life Cycle to ensure that we can iterate our approach through reusable and upgradable components. 

• Software Development Process Improvement: Work across all domains to understand and improve the overall flow of value from idea to production.  This cross disciplinary charge will require engaging with Product Managers, Business Analysis, Engineering Managers, Engineers and business stakeholders to identify the constraint in the delivery system. 

Team responsibilities:  

• Personnel Management: The Director directly manages a group of Engineering Managers and senior individual contributors.  The Director will be responsible for their overall career development and growth. 

• Innovation: Lead and support teams in their development of new products and services that support the overall mission of improving engineering at Grainger.  The Director will be responsible for the life cycle of those services, including advertising their introduction and when they are retired. 

• Tooling Management: Lead and support the selection of Developer Experience and engineering measurement tools and their full life cycle from implementation to retirement. 

You Have: 

• 5 to 7 years of people management experience  

• 5+ years of demonstrated experience in SLDC using Agile methodologies, continuous delivery, cloud and modern engineering approaches to solve business problems  

• Experience leading digital transformation programs or initiatives in medium to large engineering organizations. 

• Experience communicating a clear and concise message to various levels of the organization, from engineers to CXO levels 

• Demonstrated experience working with engineering and architecture leaders to define patterns and practices that improve our delivery processes. 

• Requires a bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems or a related study or equivalent project-related experience. 

Rewards and Benefits: 

With benefits starting day one, Grainger is committed to your safety, health and wellbeing. Our programs provide choice and flexibility to meet our team members' individual needs. Check out some of the rewards available to you at Grainger 

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans 

• Paid time off (PTO) and 6 company holidays per year 

• Automatic 6% 401(k) company contribution each pay period 

• Employee discounts, parental leave, 3:1 match on donations and tuition reimbursement 

• A comprehensive set of emotional, financial, physical and social wellbeing programs 

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible 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.  With this in mind, should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.

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