Senior Manager, Reliability & Platform Engineering

Mcmaster--carr-Supply-Company; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 351,000 - 403,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mentorship program

Employee resource groups

Medical, dental, vision plans with no月

Job summary

McMaster-Carr is seeking an extraordinary engineering leader to shape reliability across our hybrid platforms. You will guide site reliability, infrastructure, and platform teams, owning production systems end-to-end and coaching engineers to scale.

You will influence architecture across on-premise data centers, cloud platforms, and seamless integration between domains. You will partner with leaders to advance incident response maturity, champion secure, scalable patterns, and deliver durable

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in SRE/Infrastructure/Platform Engineering with ownership of production systems.
• Experience growing and coaching engineers across large-scale initiatives.
• Ability to dissect complex failures and reduce toil across distributed systems.
• Designing and operating resilient, large-scale distributed systems with near-term execution.
• Expertise in hybrid environments and networking fundamentals (routing, DNS, VPNs, service mesh).
• Knowledge of cloud security best practices including IAM and secrets management.
• Ability to lead cross-functional initiatives translating architecture into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term architectural direction with engineering leaders to scale platforms securely and efficiently.
• Design resilient patterns for hybrid service connectivity and multi-region failover.
• Harden cloud and on-prem environments from identity to runtime security.
• Drive incident response maturity through automation and runbooks.
• Upskill the team through mentorship and technical coaching.
• Create clarity where requirements are fuzzy and deliver durable, reliable solutions.

Skills

SRE leadership

Distributed systems

Hybrid cloud/on-prem

Incident response

Mentorship

Cross-functional leadership

Cloud security

Tools

OpenAI

Copilot

Claude

Gemini

Perplexity

Kafka

IBM MQ

Splunk

Job description

Senior Manager, Reliability & Platform Engineering

Chicago, IL (Elmhurst)

Who We Are

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.

Our website, mcmaster.com, 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.

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.

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.

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.

How You’ll Make an Impact

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.

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 Do

Your 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

• 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 Compensation

Total 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.

• Informal and formal mentorship
• Employee resource groups
• Medical, dental, pharmacy, and vision plans with no monthly premiums

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

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and dedicated to providing employees a workplace with reasonable accommodations and free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. At McMaster-Carr, we do not make employment decisions based on age, ethnicity, citizenship status, military status, gender identity and expression, race, religion, disability status, marital status, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected group.

This position is not eligible for work authorization sponsorship by McMaster-Carr.

Data We Collect

We may collect professional, education and employment-related data, and any assessments made throughout the recruiting process, to evaluate candidacy for employment. To communicate with job applicants, we may collect applicant names, contact information, and other personal identifiers, including those outlined in the California customer records statute. Through voluntary disclosure, we may also collect protected classifications under federal or California law (e.g., race, gender, etc.). For additional details about the personal information we collect and its uses, please clickhere .

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in McMaster-Carr’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged