About the RoleAs a Senior Technical Product Manager (TPM) within Zoro's Enterprise Platform Engineering organization, you shape platform strategy and architectural intent in partnership with the Director of Platform Engineering and Staff Platform Engineers.
You operate at the intersection of business outcomes, system architecture, and engineering execution, ensuring platform investments are
valuable, viable, operable, resilient, compliant, and cost-aware before teams commit to implementation.
You define logical system boundaries, align stakeholders around measurable outcomes, and ensure delivery aligns with approved architectural intent and business priorities (without owning implementation design).
Key Responsibilities- Strategic Platform Direction and Architectural Intent
- Define and communicate conceptual/logical architecture for platform capabilities (boundaries, responsibilities, interactions) aligned to business outcomes.
- Own and author Solution Assessments that define problem, success measures, constraints, risks, and high-level system direction.
- Manage platform evolution over time through sequencing, investment trade-offs, and deprecation strategy.
- Align architectural direction to business goals, risk tolerance, compliance requirements (PCI, SOX, NIST CSF), and cost expectations in partnership with key stakeholders.
- Proven experience implementing strict data governance and IAM-based access controls to secure core product and taxonomy categorizations.
- Partner with Staff Engineers to ensure architectural intent is technically feasible and operationally sound.
- Solution Viability and Trade-Off Management
- Be accountable for solution viability: operability, resilience, scalability, and directional cost implications are assessed early.
- Frame business vs. technology trade-offs in terms of value, risk, cost, and time-to-deliver.
- Continuously evaluate value vs. cost, identifying simplification, optimization, and toil reduction opportunities.
- Demonstrated FinOps experience with a track record of actively driving down cloud infrastructure costs and decommissioning legacy systems without impacting downstream consumers.
- Validate solutions can be sustainably supported by engineering and operational teams.
- Champions the integration of strict observability baselines (Datadog) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) directly into the engineering definition of 'Done'."
- Compliance, Risk, and Governance
- Identify and document compliance, cybersecurity, and risk considerations early in the Solution Assessment process.
- Ensure appropriate engagement with Global Risk Compliance and Cloud Security, and partner with engineering leadership to translate requirements into actionable technical designs.
- Maintain visibility into auditability, data protection, and regulatory constraints impacting platform systems.
- Stakeholder Alignment and Execution Enablement
- Must possess the ability to ruthlessly prioritize platform stabilization over feature delivery, acting as a gatekeeper to prevent over-promising timelines to executive stakeholders.
- Align stakeholders on opportunity, success definition, and expected outcomes prior to delivery.
- Represent developer/platform-user needs in roadmap decisions; monitor adoption and operational performance to guide roadmap adjustments.
- Partner with Engineering Managers to align sequencing and delivery with architectural intent and business priorities.
Minimum Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years in technical product management, platform strategy, systems architecture, or related technical leadership roles
- Experience defining system-level solutions for complex, cross-team initiatives
- Solid understanding of AI tooling that accelerates TPM work; stays current on emerging options
- Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and platform engineering
- Experience managing event-driven architectures
- Experience articulating trade-offs across cost, risk, compliance (PCI/SOX/NIST), and operational sustainability
- Proven ability to align cross-functional stakeholders across business, engineering, and security
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Preferred Qualifications- Experience in ecommerce or high-scale B2B technology environments
- Success shaping platform roadmaps that improved developer productivity, operational resilience, or scalability
- Experience partnering closely with Staff-level Engineers or Architects on enterprise initiatives
- Familiarity with internal platform/foundational engineering organizations
- Track record of evaluating platform investments for value realization and cost efficiency
Total RewardsZoro'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:
- Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment
- Maternity support programs, nursing benefits, and up to 14 weeks paid leave for birth parents and up to 4 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents. We also support growing your family through access to adoption assistance program
- 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist and Wellhub portal membership to support your mental and emotional wellbeing
- At least 18 paid time off days annually for full-time employees and 6 company holidays per year
- 6% company contribution to a 401K Retirement Savings Plan each pay period, no employee contribution required
- Tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing and access to financial counseling, education, and tools
- Charitable Gift Program - match gift to an eligible educational, cultural, community health, and human service organizations
- Employee discounts and admission to various civic and cultural institutions around Chicago
- Zoro office perks including coffee bar, beer on tap, unlimited snacks, access to the onsite gym, and incredible city skyline views
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.
Illinois
$127,100-$211,900 USD
