Software Engineer II - Technical Leadership Track
McMaster-Carr
| Company | McMaster-Carr |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | Chicago |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Not stated |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 30 Oct 2025 |
| Last verified | 11 Aug 2026 |
| Source | Employer ATS (greenhouse) |
Description
Who We Are McMaster-Carr is a leading e-commerce company offering products that help keep operations running smoothly, innovators designing the next generation of solutions, and makers creating and manufacturing. Our customers have trusted us for over 120 years. We earn and keep that trust by offering the right products, making them easy to find, and delivering them fast, so our customers can solve problems with greater speed, precision, and ease. Our industry-leading e-commerce experience, indispensable product selection, and world-class service bring hundreds of thousands of customers to McMaster.com each day. Our curious, exceptional people are at the heart of our evolution and customer experience. They turn new challenges and disruptive technologies into opportunities to refine our operations, expand our product offering, and deliver a better experience for every customer. Our Culture We intentionally cultivate a culture focused on clear execution and long‑term growth. We are responsible for building systems that endure for decades and support the company’s long-term growth. 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. As an engineering leader here, you'll have significant autonomy with end-to-end ownership where you make product decisions while building things real people interact with directly. How You'll Make an Impact As part of our software engineering team, you'll develop the high-scale production software that powers our e-commerce experience and our world-class operations. From customer-facing web features to distribution center automation, we design and scale critical systems that enable McMaster-Carr to deliver same-day or next-day orders reliably and efficiently. This is a track to grow into technical leadership roles that include people, project, and technology management responsibilities. Your progression is driven by the impact of your work. As a software engineer, you'll work on projects like:
Improve how customers find what they need on our website - You will build and evolve the systems that help our customers find, evaluate, and understand millions of industrial products across our digital publications. This includes improving search relevance with LLMs and simplifying navigation across our product offering that makes our website faster and easier to use.
McMaster.ai : Build and scale our domain-expert AI assistant that turns McMaster’s product data and customer history into a continuously learning assistant that interprets intent, narrows options, explains tradeoffs, and carries context across sessions to make complex industrial work feel effortless.
Make fulfillment smarter and help us plan ahead - Design systems that improve how we pick, pack, and ship orders so thousands of customers each day get what they need, faster.
What You'll Do
The first 30 days are about learning with purpose: understanding our goals, getting a clear picture of the customer journey, and building fluency in the codebase. As you onboard, you'll develop features that are small enough to help you ramp quickly, but substantial enough to matter.
As you continue to design, implement, and deliver features, you’ll start taking on less‑defined challenges where you’ll sharpen requirements in addition to developing thoughtful solutions that meaningfully improve the customers' experience. In doing so, you'll create clarity and momentum that enables you and your teammates to deliver exceptional experiences.
As you progress you will begin to coach others and broaden your collaboration. This can look like participation in code reviews, mentoring more junior engineers, and contributing to team-wide engineering quality. Yo