Senior Manager, Reliability & Platform Engineering
at Mcmastercarr
- Seniority
- Senior
- Location
- Chicago, IL (Elmhurst)
- Posted
- 5d ago
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at Mcmastercarr
<p><strong>Who We Are</strong></p> <p>McMaster-Carr is trusted by industrial customers to help keep manufacturing lines running, operations moving, and customers innovating. We earn that trust by offering the right products, making them easy to find, and delivering them quickly.</p> <p>Our website, <a href="https://www.mcmaster.com/">mcmaster.com</a>, is a huge part of that promise, and it's earned a reputation among engineers for being fast, reliable, and refreshingly easy to use. Customers count on it whether they're replacing a critical part, keeping operations moving, or finding exactly what they need under real time pressure.</p> <p>At McMaster-Carr, engineering is central to everything we do. Our systems power a business that customers rely on every day, and the reliability, scalability, and performance of those systems directly shape the experience we deliver.</p> <p> </p> <p><a href="https://www.builtinchicago.org/articles/what-its-build-tech-career-mcmaster-carr-ownership-and-long-term-growth"><strong>Our Culture</strong></a></p> <p>We intentionally cultivate a culture focused on clear execution and long-term growth. We build and maintain nearly all our critical systems ourselves, outsourcing very little, because we believe engineers who own their systems end-to-end build better ones, and many of the systems running today have been evolving here for decades. That responsibility means engineering work starts with a deep understanding of the problem and its impact, grounded in clear ownership, open communication, and direct feedback. Our teams are trusted to make thoughtful decisions about how work gets done, balancing a high bar for quality with practical execution. We've built much of our infrastructure on-premise by choice, not default, and we're bringing that same diligence with us as we extend into cloud and colocation.</p> <p>Our leaders understand that great engineering organizations are not built by simply solving today’s problems. They are built by developing strong technical teams, creating systems that scale with the business, and establishing practices that allow engineers to do their best work.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>How You’ll Make an Impact</strong></p> <p>We'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.</p> <p>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:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Hybrid Infrastructure — </strong>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.</li> <li><strong>mcmaster.com</strong> — 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.</li> <li><strong>Customer Navigation</strong> — strengthen the reliability of search, browsing, and systems that help customers navigate millions of SKUs.</li> <li><strong>AI & Data Systems</strong> — scale our AI agents and the broader AI infrastructure stack to ensure low-latency inference, secure data flows, and resilient distributed systems.</li> <li><strong>Fulfillment & Automation</strong> — build and harden the systems that integrate with warehouse automation, delivery orchestration, and customer service operations.</li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></p> <p><strong>Your first 30 days</strong> 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.</p> <p>As you settle in, you’ll take ownership of ambiguous, cross‑cutting challenges such as:</p> <ul> <li>Partnering with engineering leaders to define <strong>long‑term architectural direction</strong>, ensuring our platforms scale securely and while remaining performant.</li> <li>Designing resilient patterns for <strong>hybrid service connectivity</strong>, including secure ingress/egress, zero‑trust networking, and multi‑region failover.</li> <li>Leading efforts to <strong>harden cloud and on‑premise environments</strong>, from identity boundaries to network segmentation to runtime security.</li> <li>Driving <strong>incident response maturity</strong>, reducing time‑to‑detect and time‑to‑restore through automation, runbooks, and systemic improvements.</li> <li><strong>Upskilling your team</strong> through mentorship, technical coaching, and creating an environment where engineer