How You'll Make an ImpactWe're looking for an exceptional engineering leader to help define the future of engineering at McMaster-Carr, someone who can move from solving hard technical problems themselves to leading others through those same challenges. You'll join a department where site reliability is already championed by strong technical leaders across every team you touch, but this role carries a unique charge: setting the vision for how our reliability practices evolve company-wide. Success here means cultivating strong engineering talent, providing technical leadership across multiple simultaneous efforts, and influencing outcomes well beyond your own direct contributions.
Our engineering teams operate within domains: distinct, high-impact areas of our platform that let engineers dive deep, build expertise, and release work that matters. In this role, you and your team will shape the reliability, performance, and security of the hybrid systems that power these domains, spanning on-premise data centers, cloud platforms, and the connective tissue between them. You'll partner closely with teams across:
- Hybrid Infrastructure - extend our on-premise footprint, which reflects a deliberate choice for security and uptime, not legacy inertia, while thoughtfully evolving toward cloud and colocation with that same diligence. You'll revolutionize the foundational compute, storage, and networking layers that support both worlds, ensuring seamless interoperability and predictable performance.
- mcmaster.com - own the reliability and performance of the site our customers trust most, keeping it fast, resilient, and available even under our highest-traffic, highest-pressure moments.
- Customer Navigation - strengthen the reliability of search, browsing, and systems that help customers navigate millions of SKUs.
- AI & Data Systems - scale our AI agents and the broader AI infrastructure stack to ensure low-latency inference, secure data flows, and resilient distributed systems.
- Fulfillment & Automation - build and harden the systems that integrate with warehouse automation, delivery orchestration, and customer service operations.
Across these domains, you'll drive clarity, reduce operational friction, and build the guardrails that allow teams to move quickly without compromising reliability or security.
What You'll DoYour first 30 days are about learning with purpose: understanding our current architecture, identifying opportunities to improve the performance of data flow across our systems, and building fluency in our operational tooling. You'll begin by improving targeted components-small enough to ramp quickly, substantial enough to matter.
As you settle in, you'll take ownership of ambiguous, cross-cutting challenges such as:
- Partnering with engineering leaders to define long-term architectural direction, ensuring our platforms scale securely and while remaining performant.
- Designing resilient patterns for hybrid service connectivity, including secure ingress/egress, zero-trust networking, and multi-region failover.
- Leading efforts to harden cloud and on-premise environments, from identity boundaries to network segmentation to runtime security.
- Driving incident response maturity, reducing time-to-detect and time-to-restore through automation, runbooks, and systemic improvements.
- Upskilling your team through mentorship, technical coaching, and creating an environment where engineers can do their best work.
You'll create clarity where requirements are fuzzy, build momentum across teams, and deliver durable solutions that raise the reliability bar for the entire organization.
What You Bring- 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Platform Engineering, with deep ownership of production systems and direct experience managing and developing engineers.
- A track record of growing engineers through complex, large-scale systems work, knowing when to dive into the architecture yourself and when to maximize your leverage by coaching someone else through it.
- Experience leading systemic improvements: you dissect complex failures across distributed systems, cut through noise to isolate root causes, and reduce toil on our reliability team.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating resilient, large-scale distributed systems, from architecture and capacity planning through launch and iterative refinement, while remaining close to the details of execution.
- Expertise operating hybrid environments, including on-premise data centers, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and a strong command of networking fundamentals, including routing, load balancing, DNS, VPNs, service mesh, and zero-trust architectures.
- Demonstrated experience implementing cloud security best practices, such as IAM design, secrets management, network segmentation, and workload hardening.
- Ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with engineering and operations teams to translate architecture into business impact.
Technologies We Use- Backend: .NET, .NET 10, NET Core, C#, Python
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS
- Database: MongoDB, Elasticsearch, SQL Server, Db2, Redis, PostgreSQL
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitLab, Azure, Linux, VMWare, Azure Local, Akamai
- LLMs: OpenAI, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity
- Messaging/Data Streaming: Kafka, IBM MQ
- Security, Monitoring & Vulnerability Management: Splunk, Tenable, Carbon Black, Sentinel One, Symantec, Active Directory/Entra ID, ForeScout, Proofpoint, Checkpoint, Wireshark, Cisco ACI
Cash CompensationTotal cash compensation is generally around $351,000 - $403,000 and includes profit sharing based on company profitability.
You will also receive a relocation stipend (if applicable) and signing bonus.
BenefitsGrowth & Learning- 100% tuition reimbursement
- Informal and formal mentorship
- Employee resource groups
Health & Wellbeing- Medical, dental, pharmacy, and vision plans with no monthly premiums
- Inclusive, all-gender benefits
Family & Future- Paid parental leave for all new parents
- Adoption and surrogacy assistance
- First-time home buyer assistance
- Industry-leading company-funded retirement accounts
Time Off- Paid vacation and personal time
