Company Overview

Grainger is North America's leading Maintenance Repair & Operating provider and we are the 10th largest North American E-commerce player with over 50% of our revenue coming from online transactions. We deliver technology solutions across the enterprise including our call centers, branch network, sales, and our various digital channels. The team supports over 1000 applications across the network and operates in an agile environment to deliver complex solutions quickly and seamlessly.

This role is typically located in our downtown Chicago office, but due to COVID-19 will be fully virtual until further notice. Once this office location has a return to work plan, the team member will be required to be on-site.

Position Description

Grainger associates are the ones who get it done. We provide supplies to customers who keep heart of America beating. We sell more than 1.6M products to over 3.2M customers globally in various industries such as government, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. and we work with over 5K suppliers to keep our distribution centers and branches supplied with what our customers need.
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 on-premises 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.
We are looking for individuals who can solve challenging business problems through the use of technology, engineering, and leadership. This role requires a leader who is willing to be different, to be able to be steps ahead of our competitors, and has a sense of urgency to meet our customer's needs.
If you are this type of leader who has the mindset we are looking for, then continue reading.
This role is a Director of Product Engineering for the Keepstock IoT product. The Leader has a default setting of engineering and instills continuous delivery as a foundation and can take a step back to address the broader system architecture. Additionally, this leader has extensive knowledge in building diversely responsible teams and having the ability to bring the teams together to execute, operationalize and scale a product.
The individual is a specialist with in-depth domain knowledge and expertise. They bring a systems-thinking perspective, optimizing interaction patterns between capabilities within their specific domain and across domains with other Architects. They are frequently Grainger's deepest technology experts in their respective domains (product) and as such, are involved in technology strategy, migration, integration, and evolution of their accountable capability as enablers for the delivery teams. Sr. Technical Architects look across business, data, applications, and technology to support delivery teams while providing expertise and perspective on modern IT software delivery practices. They also act as champions and co-creators with other Architects and Tech Leads to bring new ideas, new technologies, and new design patterns to any governing bodies for Enterprise-wide adoption and dissemination. They may not code but have a deep technical understanding of the domain and modern technology approaches and practices. Work with product management to prioritize, build and deliver on the Business roadmap. Additionally, have extensively works with architecture to own the engineering roadmap of a product as well as leverage cost-benefit analysis to determine TCO and overall value.
Works with Product Management, Product Engineering leadership, engineers & other Architects, specializing in component capabilities within 1 or more product domains. Drive capabilities' migration, leveraging key Architectural principles, e.g., APIs, Event-Driven or Cloud-Native Architectures, ensuring there is a program for work alignment across domains and evangelizing the Keepstock engineering/architecture roadmap(including security, cost/benefit analysis, operationalization).
The Keepstock ecosystem consists of thousands of IoT machines across North America providing supplies to customers and provides the ability for Onsite Sales Representatives to gather information for the customer on their usage, a Keepstock web interface for customers to register, manage inventory, and a mobile app.

Specific Responsibilities include:

* Own the architecture for the Keepstock Product including IoT, WebApp, Mobile, Device management
* Experience with edge computing, OTA programming, and how endpoints interact with the broader ecosystem
* Work with security to ensure a robust security posture across the Keepstock footprint
* Enable security, resiliency, and quality into each aspect of the Keepstock product
* Technical Expertise & Depth: Accountable to build front end experiences and back end services allow internal and external customers to transact across thousands of categories & millions of products with minimal response times
* Demonstrated experience conceptualizing, designing, building, or significantly modifying a large-scale heterogeneous system for customer-facing channels and back-end integrations
* Extensive experience engineering highly available, cloud-native e-commerce website
* Experience with on-prem to cloud migrations through re-factoring or rebuilding, instilling foundational engineering practices
5 to 7 yrs. of People Management Experience
10+ yrs. of Experience working in Software Development
* Demonstrated experience with continuous delivery, cloud, and modern engineering approaches to solve business problems
* Requires a bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems or a related study or equivalent project-related experience. MA, MS, MBA preferred.
* Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and software environments
* Experience with cloud-native application development, CICD, DevOps, containers, and serverless functions
* Experience with machine learning, data science, and integration into the product ecosystem
* Experience operating in a large, enterprise environment with multiple platforms and a diverse set of stakeholders
* Demonstrated understanding of large-scale eCommerce software solutions.
* Strong analytical and conceptual skills; ability to create original concepts and theories in support of the Grainger Business strategy.
* Demonstrated excellence with written and verbal communication skills.
* Demonstrated strong leadership skills
* Demonstrated ability to lead, and develop a high-performing team
* Exceptional interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation, and negotiation.
* Sound knowledge of financial models and budgeting.
* Experience in vendor relationship management, from initiation through payment and performance management
* Comprehensive knowledge of facilitation and organization change management

Knowledge of the IT industry and information technologies at a high and detailed level

EEOC Statement
Grainger is an Equal Opportunity Workplace and an Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status