Staff AI Data Engineer

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:

This position at Grainger is focused on transforming both traditional relational data as well as other more complex multimodal sources like voice, pdf, or images for downstream systems that address important business needs. Your primary focus will be building pipelines for use in LLMs that are reliable, scalable, and efficient. You will play an important part in defining the strategy of the team, evaluating, and integrating data patterns and technologies, and building pipelines alongside domain experts and data scientists. You are a thoughtful observer who enjoys investigating business problems and building data solutions that address them.

You are a technical teacher that can guide teams to adopt the capabilities and products you build.

You Will:

• As a technical lead, your primary responsibility will be to design and implement highly efficient, reusable, and scalable data processing systems and pipelines to consume both relational and complex multimodal data.
• Design and implement technical solutions and processes to ensure data reliability and accuracy.
• Build pipelines that feed embedding models and vector databases while working with platform-oriented teams to ensure that database response times meet expectations.
• Develop data models and mappings and build new data assets required by data science teams. Perform exploratory data analysis on existing products and datasets.
• Educate other data engineers in adopting new patterns and tools.
• Understand trends and emerging technologies and evaluate the performance and applicability of potential tools for our requirements.
• Work within an Agile delivery / DevOps methodology to deliver product increments in iterative sprints.
• Function as SME within this area when engaging with our AI, Platform, and Business Analytics teams to build useful pipelines to address ML/AI needs.
• Work with product and business to define roadmap, communication, and architecture.
• Mentor junior team members.

You Have:

• 8+ years of experience in batch and streaming ETL using Spark, Python, Scala, Snowflake or Databricks for Data Engineering or Machine Learning workloads.
• 5+ years orchestrating and implementing pipelines with workflow tools like Databricks Workflows, Apache Airflow, or Luigi
• 3+ years of experience prepping structured and unstructured data for data science models.
• 3+ years of experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and experience with shell scripting in Bash, Unix or windows shell is preferable.
• Experience working in vector databases like Milvus, Pinecone, or Weaviate
• Experience using machine learning in data pipelines to discover, classify, and clean data.
• Implemented CI/CD with automated testing in Jenkins, Github Actions, or Gitlab CI/CD
• Familiarity with AWS Services not limited to Glue, Athena, Lambda, S3, and DynamoDB
• Demonstrated experience implementing data management life cycle, using data quality functions like standardization, transformation, rationalization, linking and matching.

Rewards and Benefits:

With benefits starting day one, our programs provide choice and flexibility to meet team members' individual needs. Check out the highlights below and review all our benefits at GraingerTotalRewards.com.

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and pet insurance plans and 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist to support your emotional wellbeing
• Paid time off (PTO) and 6 company holidays per year
• 6% company contribution to a 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan each pay period, no match 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

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.