What are the responsibilities and job description for the Director, Product Engineering position at Jobright.ai?
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Job Summary:
Grainger is a leading broad line distributor serving millions of customers worldwide. They are seeking a Director of Product Engineering to lead the Search organization, focusing on delivering advanced search capabilities across digital platforms while managing and mentoring engineering teams.
Responsibilities:
• Lead multiple cross-functional teams responsible for powering search on Grainger.com and other digital touchpoints.
• Shape the roadmap in close partnership with Product, Architecture, and Data Science.
• Ensure Grainger’s search stack — from indexing to ranking to retrieval — is modern, resilient, and delivering measurable business impact.
• Champion a hybrid retrieval strategy that blends traditional techniques (e.g., Solr) with ML and semantic models.
• Manage and mentor a group of Engineering Managers and Senior Managers.
• Build a strong, inclusive, and high-performing culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and technical excellence.
• Drive clear goals, accountability, and autonomy across teams.
• Support hiring, onboarding, career growth, and succession planning.
• Strengthen agile practices, engineering quality, observability, and operational rigor.
• Use metrics to assess system health, delivery velocity, and customer outcomes.
• Partner with peers across the organization to remove blockers, align strategy, and prioritize wisely.
• Champion DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native best practices (containers, serverless, IaC, etc.).
• Ensure strong alignment between engineering, product, data science, and architecture.
• Facilitate healthy tension, resolve ambiguity, and enable smart tradeoffs.
• Identify gaps in org design, domain boundaries, or team charters — and advocate for change.
• Represent the Search organization across engineering leadership and with executive stakeholders.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 7 years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers.
• Proven track record of leading teams that build and scale complex search or information retrieval systems.
• Deep experience with Agile, CI/CD, cloud platforms (ideally AWS), and modern software engineering practices.
• Strong product thinking and a bias for impact.
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and influence skills — especially across disciplines.
• A passion for people development and team health.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience).
Preferred:
• Familiarity with ML-powered search or close partnership with data science teams (bonus: semantic search, vector retrieval, personalization)
Company:
As a leading business-to-business organization, more than 4.5 million customers worldwide rely on Grainger for products in categories such as safety, material handling and metalworking, along with services like inventory management and technical support. Founded in 1927, headquartered in Savannah, Georgia, USA, team size 10001 employees, currently Public Company. Grainger has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships.