Company Summary
Zoro.com is a leading eCommerce platform offering nearly 12 million tools, parts and supplies for our business customers. Launched in 2011, we brought a B2C-like experience to the B2B industry, and continue to be at the forefront of digital innovation at the intersection of technology and distribution. We have rapidly grown to over $1 billion in annual revenue and we’re just getting started!
Primary Function
As a Senior Data Engineer II – Technical Lead at Zoro, you will lead medium to large initiatives that span data platforms, data products, and AI-enabled systems. You will design and build cloud-native data pipelines, services, and interfaces that power analytics, machine learning, and AI agents across the organization.
This role owns the technical direction of the team’s solutions, with explicit accountability for technical debt, architectural integrity, and long-term scalability. You will play a central role in evolving Zoro’s data platform to support AI-first use cases, including feature generation, agentic workflows, and model-integrated data services.
As a technical leader, you will mentor engineers, influence platform strategy, and partner deeply with product, analytics, and machine learning stakeholders to translate business problems into durable data and AI solutions.
Duties and Responsibilities
Technical Leadership: Collaborate with Technical Leads and Staff Engineers to define and execute the technical vision for Data Engineering, making architectural and tooling decisions that balance innovation, reliability, and long-term maintainability, including AI and agent enabled capabilities.
Design and Architecture: Responsible for your team’s overall design and architecture of scalable, reliable, and high-performance data systems to support business intelligence, analytics, and data science initiatives.
Data Pipeline Development: Build, optimize, and operate batch and streaming data pipelines that are observable, testable, cost-efficient, and explicitly designed to serve analytical, operational, and AI-driven workloads.
AI Enablement and Agentic Systems: Enable and build AI-powered systems by using AI tools in daily engineering workflows, designing and integrating MCP servers or equivalent context layers, and creating AI agents that interact safely and reliably with data systems, APIs, and business processes.
Software Craftsmanship: Champion high standards in software design, testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code, ensuring data and AI systems are secure, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise engineering standards.
Data Governance and Trust: Embed data quality, lineage, access control, privacy, and correctness guarantees into data and AI architectures, establishing guardrails that ensure trustworthy and explainable use of data by humans and AI systems.
Mentorship: Mentor and develop Data Engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, and hands-on coaching, fostering a culture of intellectual curiosity, engineering rigor, and continuous improvement.
Qualifications
Education: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, or other technology related field or an equivalent of this educational requirement in working experience is also acceptable
Experience: Minimum of 7 years of experience in Data Engineering or a related field, with at least 3 years in a leadership or senior technical role.
Technical Skills:
AI & Agent Systems: Hands-on experience using AI tools as part of daily engineering workflows, designing or integrating MCP servers or equivalent context-serving systems, and building, deploying, or integrating AI agents with an understanding of model lifecycle concerns including training, inference, monitoring, and operational reliability.
Emerging Capabilities: Experience designing or operating modern AI-adjacent data capabilities, including feature stores, vector databases, embedding pipelines, human-in-the-loop or agentic workflows, and an understanding of cost management and performance optimization for AI workloads.
Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern programming language with strong software design fundamentals.
Data Modeling and Architecture: Expert-level experience designing analytical and operational data models.
Cloud Platforms: Expert level experience with cloud-native infrastructure and managed data services.
Data Pipelines: Expert level experience of batch and streaming architectures.
Data Quality and Testing: Proven approaches to automated data validation and testing.
Data Microservices: Experience building high-performance, data-backed APIs.
Soft Skills:
Problem-Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to think critically and analytically.
Communication: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
Organization: Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple projects and priorities in a fast-paced environment.
Curiosity: A genuine curiosity about data and a proactive approach to exploring new tools and techniques.
Leadership: Proven ability to lead, inspire, and mentor Data Engineers.
Teamwork & Collaboration: Proven ability to form collaborative relationships with stakeholders across the organization.
Total Rewards
Zoro’s total compensation plan includes our Zoro Incentive Plan (ZIP) that is designed to foster and reward our team members for strong performance. Total compensation will be highly competitive.
In addition to competitive compensation, Zoro offers comprehensive benefits and perks including:
For additional information and details regarding our benefits and our parent company, W. W. Grainger, please click on the link here.
The pay range provided is not a guarantee of compensation. The range listed reflects the expected base pay for this position at the time of posting, based on the role's job grade. Actual compensation may vary depending on factors such as location, relevant experience and individual qualifications.
Our Culture
Zoro was founded in 2011 with a simple idea: make it easy for businesses to get the tools, parts, and supplies they need to keep things running. We've grown by staying curious, moving quickly, and solving everyday challenges in smart, practical ways. Backed by W.W. Grainger and inspired by our endless assortment business model, we’re on a clear path toward our next big milestone: $2 billion in revenue—and beyond.
At Zoro, we don’t just follow a playbook—we help build it. You’ll get to work on real problems with a supportive team that shares ideas freely, learns from each other, and celebrates wins together. Our culture is grounded in values that guide how we show up every day: Winning & Learning Together, Being Customer Obsessed, Being Transparent, and Taking Ownership. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re always asking good questions.
Zoro’s culture has been recognized by Fortune, Best Places to Work, and Built In Chicago—but the recognition we care about most comes from our team members, who make this place what it is.
We also know that flexibility matters. Our hybrid work model gives you space to focus and the flexibility to live your life — asking team members to be onsite at least two days a week. Our Chicago HQ (right above Ogilvie Transportation Center in the Accenture Tower) is always open and ready for connection, collaboration, or just a good cup of coffee.
At Zoro, we’re growing fast toward big aspirations — and we’re continuously excited about the new challenges we get to solve together.
We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are also committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible work environment that includes both providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process as well as throughout the course of one’s employment. Should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, including, but not limited to use of our website, any part of the application, interview, or hiring process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.
Zoro is an eCommerce company that’s on a mission to help business owners get everything they need to run their businesses and thrive–from office supplies to power tools. But we’re way more than a website. We’re a team of great people with an award-winning culture. Check us out and see for yourself!
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