Senior Staff Software Engineer

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: 

A rapidly growing team at Grainger is focusing on transforming a variety of transactional and operational data, to support the development of new analytical tools and services aimed at providing all of our users, both Customers and Sellers, with reporting, analytics, and actionable insights that save them time and money; resulting in deeper customer relationships and increased market share. #StartWithTheCustomer 

An individual in this role can expect to contribute to the development of our React front end, a variety of JVM APIs, and Python ETL scripts that support our analytics and insights applications. You will play an important part in defining the strategy of the team, evaluating, integrating data and technologies, and building Front End and/or APIs alongside domain experts. You are a thoughtful observer who enjoys investigating business problems and building full stack solutions that address them. You are a technical teacher that can guide teams to adopt the capabilities and products that you build. You are an avid and patient communicator, able to convince collaborators of the value of your position, but also compromise at times to yield greater benefit to stakeholders. 

This role reports to the Product Engineering Manager and can be based in Lake Forest or Chicago, IL on a hybrid basis. Full-time remote candidates are also encouraged to apply. Some travel will be required for team meetings at our corporate offices. 

You Will: 

• Develop, test, and deploy high-quality web applications using React, Next.js for the front end, and Java and/or Python for the back end.  

• Collaborate with product managers and designers to understand user requirements and translate them into technical specifications.  

• Build, utilize reusable and scalable components and libraries.  

• Understand trends and emerging technologies and evaluate the performance and applicability of potential tools for our requirements.   

• Optimize applications for maximum speed, scalability, and reliability.  

• Partner with stakeholders including data and ML teams, design, product and executive teams and assisting them with software and data related technical issues.  

• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code following best practices and coding standards.  

• Troubleshoot, debug, and optimize existing systems to improve performance.  

• Integrate with RESTful APIs and third-party services.  

• Work on and enhance the CI/CD pipelines. 

• Promote effective team practices, shape team culture, and engage in active mentoring.  

• Mentor junior engineers. 

• Collaborate with tech leads, architecture, engineering management, and product management to validate that requirements are clear and technical approaches are focused on development of high-quality software. 

• 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. 

You Have: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, related degree, or relevant work experience. 

• 10 years of experience with Modern Software Engineering projects and practices: designing, building, and deploying scalable software applications.   

• 5 + years of experience in designing building deploying cloud native solutions.   

• Proficiency in modern front-end technologies and building applications using Spring Boot and/or Python. 

• Proficient in a containerization platform (Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift), build automation, continuous integration/deployment, and automated monitoring. 

• Proficient in a cloud stack (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and event-streaming technologies (Kafka). 

• Proficient in RESTful API-driven design. 

• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with team members.  

• Understanding of distributed system design and experience building production grade distributed systems.  

• Hands-on experience with React.js and/or Next.js frameworks for front-end development. 

• Solid experience with NodeJS, Java, or Python for developing APIs 

• Experience with data technologies such as PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Databricks. 

• Experience with a visualization library such as chart.js or d3.js. 

• Proven experience collaborating across teams to develop and implement software engineering best practices. 

• Proficient in TDD practices and testing frameworks. 

• Familiarity with Terraform or other IaC 

• Familiarity with version control systems (e.g., Git) and CI/CD pipelines.  

• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and DevOps practices.  

• Ability to produce detailed, comprehensive software documentation, such as testing plans, requirement specs, design docs and incorporate technical requirements for user stories. 

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.