Senior Manager, Reliability & Platform Engineering

McMaster-Carr; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Signing bonus

Relocation stipend

Job summary

McMaster-Carr is seeking an exceptional engineering leader to define the future of reliability across hybrid on‑prem and cloud environments. You will lead cross‑functional teams, setting vision for reliability practices and guiding multiple domains to improve performance and security.

You will advance incident response maturity, scale platforms, and mentor engineers to build durable, high‑performing systems that power our domain ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Platform Engineering.
• Track record of growing engineers through complex, large‑scale systems work.
• Experience leading systemic improvements: dissect failures and reduce toil.
• Designing and operating resilient, large‑scale distributed systems.
• Expertise operating hybrid environments: on‑prem, cloud, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience implementing cloud security best practices: IAM, secrets, segmentation, hardening.
• Ability to lead cross‑functional initiatives translating architecture into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Define long‑term architectural direction and ensure scalable, secure, performant platforms.
• Design resilient patterns for hybrid service connectivity, including zero‑trust networking and multi‑region failover.
• Harden cloud and on‑prem environments from identity to runtime security.
• Drive incident response maturity with automation, runbooks, and systemic improvements.
• Upskill the team through mentorship and technical coaching.

Job description

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 Culture

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.

Our team is onsite three days a week in Elmhurst, IL.

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.

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

• 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 Compensation

Base salary: $250,000 - $310,000

Total cash compensation typically ranges from $315,000 - $420,000, which includes annual cash profit sharing based on company profitability.

You will also receive a signing bonus and a relocation stipend (if applicable).

Benefits

Growth & 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

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.