Lead Backend Engineer

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:
KeepStock is Grainger's Inventory Management Solution for helping its customers streamline their inventory management processes and improve productivity. KeepStock is in the middle of a digital transformation where it is shifting from an on-premise monolithic architecture to a cloud-based microservices architecture. KeepStock has teams building full-stack web experiences, microservices, event-streaming based reporting capabilities, and IoT platforms using modern development techniques and technologies.
We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the KeepStock engineering team. You will focus on microservice/backend development and event-streaming technologies to help develop the APIs that empower Grainger team members to manage KeepStock customers.
We are looking for someone excited about domain-driven design, clean code, and solving diverse problems, who is ready to join a collaborative team environment that values collective code ownership and other XP practices.
You will report to the Software Engineering Manager
You Will:

• Write code in Kotlin using frameworks such as Spring Boot and Ktor with a focus on clean code, refactoring, and test-driven development.
• Implement event-streaming applications and architectures using Apache Kafka.
• Deploy working software to production early and often using DevOps practices such as build automation, containerized deployments, infrastructure as code, pipeline as code, feature flag techniques, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and trunk-based development.
• Use and promote XP engineering practices such as pair programming, TDD, team ownership of quality, and fast iterative feedback.
• Coach 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.
• Demonstrate a strong sense of collaborative code ownership, strategic thinking, and personal accountability.
• Treat deployments/releases as non-events because you are a disciple of the theory of continuous delivery with a history of its application in practice.
• Lead the building of RESTful APIs, considering the challenges with backward compatibility in a deploy-often environment using best practices such as TDD, trunk-based development, CI/CD, and frequent incremental iterative releases/deployments.

You Have:

• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, related degree, or relevant work experience.
• 6+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• 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.
• Proficiency in Java or Kotlin.
• Proficiency modern front-end technologies and building applications using Spring Boot and/or Ktor.
• Proficiency in writing efficient SQL for databases such as PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL.
• Proficient in TDD practices and testing frameworks.
• Ability to produce detailed, comprehensive software documentation, such as testing plans, requirement specs, design docs and incorporate technical requirements for user stories.
• Proficient in Git and a continuous integration tool.

Rewards and Benefits:
With benefits starting day one, Grainger is committed to your safety, health and wellbeing. Our programs provide choice to meet our team members' individual needs. Check out some of the rewards available to you at Grainger.

• Paid time off (PTO) days and 6 company holidays per year
• Benefits starting on day one, including medical, dental vision and life insurance
• 6% 401(k) company contribution each pay period with no personal contribution required
• Employee discounts, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing, free access to financial counseling, education and more.

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.