Software Engineering Manager

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. We’re looking for passionate people to join our team as we continue leading the industry over our next 100 years.

Position Details:

KeepStock is Grainger’s Inventory Management Solution for helping its customers streamline their inventory management processes and improve productivity. KeepStock is in the middle of a digital transformation where it is shifting from an on-premise monolithic architecture to a cloud-based microservices architecture. KeepStock has teams building full-stack web experiences, microservices, event-streaming based reporting capabilities, and IoT platforms using modern development techniques and technologies.  If any of this sounds exciting, then this opportunity is right for you.

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will create an environment where diverse, mission-driven teams find joy in the creative exercise of shipping value daily and go home each day knowing they can focus on time away from work because their systems are resilient and performant. You will partner with Product Management to lead teams in the end-to-end execution of project work and help define and drive modern software engineering practices. You will lead a team that uses full-stack and event-streaming technologies to develop the web-based tools that empower Grainger team members to manage KeepStock customers. We are looking for a leader who encourages teamwork with senior leadership and has a clear vision of what determines a successful solution for the team, the customer, and our company.

You will report to the Senior Manager - Product Engineering

You Will:

• Promote an engineering mindset into the team through coaching, mentoring, and partnering with practice leads with bi-directional feedback.·      
• Not directly involved in hands-on coding but understands how to code and develop a workload to production.·      
• Apply a hands-on understanding of AWS, containers, and leverage that ability to step back to support a hybrid ecosystem.·      
• Ensure that all members of a development team (Tech Lead, Software Engineer, QE) have the skills and tools required to achieve their best work.·      
• Use metrics to monitor the health and productivity of the teams and to understand capacity limitations for forecasting possible headcount changes and delivery timelines.·      
• Create/promote a culture of team autonomy, continuous improvement, and sustainable pace within the teams they manage.
• Offer technical guidance, facilitate team solutions, and pull in other experts to assist the team.      
• Partner with Product Managers and UX to develop a symbiotic relationship that supports the engineering team's ability to do their most impactful work, suggest technically solutions in product development, and deliver value.      
• Connect people with upskilling needs to the proper resources and act as a coach towards those efforts.    
• Assist teams in the removal of impediments, especially when coming from outside the team.
• Work in a collaborative team environment with a focus on continuous improvement and learning, applying teamwork skills such as empathy, engagement,, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and constructive feedback.
• Manage staff through processes including feedback, career development, performance reviews, performance improvement.

You Have:

• Bachelor’s degree in software engineering, related degree, or relevant work experience.
• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience developing software and quality engineers, and the ability to identify opportunities for growth and upskilling team members.
• Deep passion for servant leadership and the knowledge of how to apply these principles from the perspective of people management.
• Experience communicating updates and resolutions to customers and other partners, with the ability to discuss complex topics with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience promoting collaboration to guide strategy and inform continuous improvement.
• Experience with development best practices such as pair programming, TDD, CI/CD, and other XP practices that help development teams increase quality and throughput.
• Familiarity with containerization platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift), build automation, continuous integration/deployment, and automated monitoring.
• Familiarity with event-streaming and microservice architectures, and RESTful API design.
• Familiarity with modern front-end technologies and building applications using React, Next.js, and Node.js.

Grainger is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.