Principal Technical Architect

Company: W. W. Grainger
Location: Chicago
Posted on: June 1, 2025

Job Description:

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.We are looking for individuals who can solve challenging business problems through technology, engineering, and leadership. We are seeking a Principal Technical Architect responsible for a portion of the Grainger Ordering systems focused on visibility and data.You will have a systems-thinking perspective, optimizing interaction patterns between capabilities within your specific domain and across domains with other Architects. Principal Technical Architects frequently have technical breadth in their respective domains and are involved in technology strategy, migration, integration, and evolution of their accountable capability as enablers for the delivery teams. They also act as champions and co-creators with other Engineering Directors and Tech Leads to bring new ideas, technologies, and design patterns to governing bodies for Enterprise-wide adoption and distribution. There may be opportunities to co-develop some features with technical leads or other senior engineering roles, but you will have more than just development responsibilities.You will be reporting to the Sr. Director Technical Architecture Leader. This can be a hybrid/remote role based in our Chicago office.Responsibilities:

• Help teams architect and engineer solutions across multiple technologies and platforms.
• Mentor Grainger Technical leads, Senior engineers, Product leaders, Engineering Managers.
• Participate in recruiting activities for senior technical talent.
• Steer architecture decisions within the design and architecture review process.
• Influence the GTG executive lead team to pursue technology strategies and architectural direction.
• Research current and emerging technologies, proposing changes where needed.
• Define capability and systems roadmap and key architectural tradeoffs across Grainger Order systems.
• Inform multiple stakeholders about any problems with the current technical solutions being implemented.
• Define the conceptual, logical, and transitional architectures.Minimum Requirements:
  • At least 12 years of industry experience in software engineering and architecture.
  • Experience with engineering patterns and multiple implementations (on-prem and cloud) technical expertise.
  • Bring a systems-thinking perspective, choosing the appropriate integration patterns between capabilities within your specific domain.
  • Experience in event-driven, cloud-native architectures, data and analytics architectures (including Lakehouse), and API design.
  • Bachelor's degree in business (or Management), Computer Science, Engineering, related disciplines, or equivalent work experience.With benefits starting day one, Grainger is committed to your safety, health, and wellbeing. Our programs provide choice and flexibility 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 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, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.
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Keywords: W. W. Grainger, Arlington Heights , Principal Technical Architect, IT / Software / Systems , Chicago, Illinois