Senior Manager, 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:

As a Senior Product Engineering Manager, you will oversee the health of development teams and their members. You are a career development mentor for all members of the teams they manage. A overseer of the collective skills of the teams as well. To this end, they will make plans and find opportunities for upskilling, inclusive of any Product Engineering Managers who may report to them. You are also responsible for performance management of team members.

You will manage multiple teams of technical people on software development teams. Up to a maximum capacity of approximately (30) people, who may align to a large complex domain and architecture. This role may also be an expansion of the role of a Product Engineering Manager by virtue of an increase in scope of responsibility, i.e. more software development teams and more direct reports in the form of Product Engineering Managers who have responsibility to manage those teams.

You will report to the Director, Product Engineering and will be based in either Lake Forest, IL or downtown Chicago on a hybrid basis (8 days per month). We will consider candidates seeking relocation to the Chicago area, and providing relocation assistance.

You Will:

• Promote an engineering mindset into the team through coaching, mentoring, and partnering with practice leads.
• Not directly hands-on coding, but understands how to code and develop a workload to production.
• Understanding of AWS, containers, and ability to step back to support a hybrid ecosystem.
• Ensure that all members of a development team (Tech Lead, Software Engineer, QA) have the skills and tools required to achieve their best work.
• Connect people with upskilling needs to the proper resources and acts as a coach towards those efforts.
• Assist teams in the removal of impediments, especially when coming from outside the team.
• Use metrics to monitor the health and productivity of the teams and to understand capacity limitations for forecasting possible headcount changes.
• Participate in headcount planning and other operational meetings with other levels of management.
• Monitor the daily health of the team to stay informed about how their assistance/coaching the team in the delivery of their commitments/forecasts can improve outcomes.
• Create/Promote a culture of team autonomy, continuous improvement, and sustainable pace within the teams that they manage.
• Manage staff through processes including feedback, career development, performance reviews, performance improvement.
• Represent the team in Architectural and Product discussions, Technical Demos or Operating Reviews.

You Have:

• 10+ years of work experience in a technical capacity. 2 or more years of people management or team leadership
• A Bachelor's degree in Business (or Management), Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent work experience is required.
• Understand how to identify opportunities for upskilling people they manage and how to improve others.
• Deep passion for servant leadership and the knowledge of how to apply these principles from the perspective of people management.
• Passion for Agile principles and processes and an understanding of how to monitor team health.
• Knowledge of business and strategy, financial planning and budgetary management
• Experience with the Performance review process including goals agreement, career development, P&D and feedback.
• Understanding of Event-driven architecture (using Kafka, AWS SQS etc.)
• Understanding of designing for highly available and resilient systems at scale.

Rewards and Benefits:

With benefits starting day one, Grainger is committed to your safety, health and wellbeing. Our programs provide choice and 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.