Software Engineer 2 - Early Career Technology Leadership Track

Chicago, IL (Elmhurst)

first seen Sep 4, 2026updated Oct 12, 2026

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archived Oct 12, 2026

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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.

Read the full posting ↓

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. You will continue to work across teams as you design and implement features that can impact our customers. Throughout your career you will drive your development. You will develop domain expertise, explore new technologies, and bring new perspectives to the challenges your team is tackling. In doing so, you'll create clarity and momentum that enables you and your teammates to deliver exceptional experiences. How You'll Grow You will start by diving into assignments that require thoughtful solutions and a deep understanding of the customer benefit or business need, not just execution. You will develop larger features with open questions that require you to do research and think through and discuss tradeoffs before implementation. Throughout your career you will drive your development. You will develop domain expertise, explore new technologies, and bring new perspectives to the challenges your team is tackling. In doing so, you'll create clarity and momentum that enables you and your teammates to deliver exceptional experiences.

Who You Are

We’re looking for December 2026 - Summer 2027 graduates who are curious, driven engineers who thrive in collaborative environments and are energized by solving hard problems.

Ideal candidates will have:

Contributed to live projects or deployed applications used by real users. Strong proficiency in compiled languages such as C#, Java, C++, or Rust. A thoughtful, analytical approach to problem-solving and software design. Ability to write high-quality, maintainable, and scalable code with Systems Design and SOLID principles. Experience improving system architecture, testing, and monitoring to ensure reliability and performance. Clear, confident communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences. Interest in growing as a mentor, coach, and leader. Cash Compensation Starting base pay is $147,800 Total cash compensation is generally around $185,000 to $200,000 and includes a profit sharing based on company profitability. You will also receive a signing bonus and relocation stipend

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 #BI-DNI 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 click here .