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