Software Engineer IV

Work Location Type: Remote
Req Number 330144
About Grainger
W.W. Grainger, Inc., is a leading broad line distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom. At Grainger, We Keep the World Working® by serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide with products and solutions delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. Known for its commitment to service and award-winning culture, the Company had 2024 revenue of $17.2 billion across its two business models. In the High-Touch Solutions segment, Grainger offers approximately 2 million maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) products and services, including technical support and inventory management. In the Endless Assortment segment, Zoro.com offers customers access to more than 14 million products, and MonotaRO.com offers more than 24 million products. For more information, visit www.grainger.com.
Compensation
The anticipated base pay compensation range for this position is $134,100.00 - $223,500.00. This role is eligible for an incentive target of up to 15 % or $ , based on the achievement of individual and company performance objectives in accordance with the current terms of the incentive program which are subject to change.
Rewards and Benefits
With benefits starting on day one, our programs provide choice and flexibility to meet team members' individual needs, including:

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment and 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist to support your emotional wellbeing.
• 18 paid time off (PTO) days annually for full-time employees (accrual prorated based on employment start date) and 6 company holidays per year.
• 6% company contribution to a 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan each pay period, no employee contribution required.
• Employee discounts, tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing and free access to financial counseling, education, and tools.
• Maternity support programs, nursing benefits, and up to 14 weeks paid leave for birth parents and up to 4 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents.

For additional information and details regarding Grainger's benefits, please click on the link below:
https://experience100.ehr.com/grainger/Home/Tools-Resources/Key-Resources/New-Hire
Grainger Benefits
The pay range provided above is not a guarantee of compensation. The range reflects the potential base pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual base pay compensation will depend, in part, on factors such as geographic work location and relevant experience and skills.
The anticipated compensation range described above is subject to change and the compensation ultimately paid may be higher or lower than the range described above.
Grainger reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion at any time, consistent with applicable law.
JOB SUMMARY
Join us as a Lead Software Engineer, Search Relevance, and help power high-impact search experiences at scale. You'll design and build systems that blend classical IR with modern semantic and vector techniques to deliver highly relevant, customer-focused results.Partnering with product and engineering teams, you'll translate business goals into measurable outcomes like improved relevance, conversion, and satisfaction-while leading technical direction, mentoring others, and driving data-informed decisions through experimentation.If you're passionate about search and building systems that directly shape the customer experience, this role is for you.
JO B FUNCTIONS
Key Responsibilities

• Lead engineer on a team responsible for the application and delivery of high-quality, maintainable software for highly complex applications
• Influence team adoption of sensible defaults to enable continuous delivery activities
• Contribute to continuous learning on your team culture by leading knowledge sharing sessions with latest technological features and engineering practices
• Maintain software in production with demonstrated ability to triage and resolve issues
• Mentor developers, conduct code reviews, and participate in pair programming
• Partners directly with IT Management team to ensure successful design and delivery of technology based solutions
• Design, build, and improve search systems using lexical (e.g., BM25/TF-IDF) and semantic/vector-based retrieval approaches.
• Develop and optimize ranking strategies, including hybrid retrieval, reranking, and learning-to-rank techniques to improve relevance.
• Build and maintain indexing pipelines, including document processing, schema design, and data freshness.
• Evaluate search quality using offline metrics (e.g., NDCG, MRR, Precision/Recall) and online experiments (A/B testing).
• Analyze search performance, identify relevance issues, and implement improvements such as query understanding, intent handling, and fallback strategies.
• Tune precision/recall tradeoffs and implement query expansion techniques (e.g., synonyms, spell correction, query relaxation).
• Contribute to production search systems, including logging, monitoring, scalability, and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define requirements, success metrics, and deliver continuous improvements.

JOB DESCRIPTION DISCLAIMER
This job description may not be inclusive of all assigned duties, responsibilities, or aspects of the job described, and may be amended at any time at the sole discretion of the Employer.
QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years experience as a Software Engineer; with experience in modern software engineering; designing; devloping, testing and deploying scalable software applications within a variety of technologies and environments.
• 3+ years hands on SOLR/Lucene search relevance work (BM25/TF IDF), schema/analyzers, query parsers, and SolrCloud operations
• 5+ years building and shipping hybrid lexical + vector search systems end to end (embeddings, ANN indexing, hybrid scoring, rollout, monitoring)
• Experience with pipeline/orchestration tools for embeddings & index refresh (e.g., Airflow/Spark), and integration of behavioral signals (click/carts) into relevance features or LTR
• Expert knowledge of programming skills
• Demonstrated knowledge of distributed system design and integration patterns
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and Dev Ops Practices
• Experience with analyzing, interpreting and communicating complex problems and practices

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Expert knowledge of programming skills
• Demonstrated knowledge of distributed system design and integration patterns
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and Dev Ops Practices
• Experience with analyzing, interpreting and communicating complex problems and practices
• Understanding of IR fundamentals (BM25/TF-IDF, tokenization, analyzers, normalization, synonyms) and when lexical vs. semantic approaches are most effective; ability to design hybrid ranking strategies and relevance guardrails at scale.
• Proficiency in embeddings, ANN methods (e.g., HNSW), and hybrid search design, including tradeoffs between recall, latency, and ranking quality, as well as reranking and learning-to-rank approaches.
• Experience with search platforms (e.g., Solr/Lucene), including distributed architecture (sharding, replication), indexing, query routing, caching, and relevance tuning; solid programming skills in Java and Python.
• Expertise in relevance metrics (NDCG, MRR, Precision/Recall) and business KPIs; ability to design experiments, build dashboards, and make data-informed tradeoffs across precision, recall, and user impact.
• Ability to communicate c omplex IR/ML concepts to diverse audiences, influence stakeholders with data, and operate effectively within modern engineering practices (Agile, CI/CD, code reviews, incident management).

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
We are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible work 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, should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, including, but not limited to use of our website, any part of the application, interview or hiring process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.