About the RoleAs a Staff Platform Software Engineer on Zoro's Enterprise Platform Engineering group for AMP, you'll provide strategic technical leadership and drive significant improvements to foundational platform services used by other Zoro engineering teams. This role is suited for highly experienced engineers who excel in defining technical direction, influencing broad architectural choices, and mentoring engineers across the organization.
You'll proactively tackle complex, cross-team challenges, foster a culture of engineering excellence, and continuously elevate technical standards to enhance developer productivity, reliability, and scalability.
Key Responsibilities- Architect, develop, and maintain critical foundational platform services and tools that significantly impact Zoro's technology stack.
- Drive cross-functional technical leadership by influencing strategic architecture decisions and shaping engineering best practices across teams.
- Mentor and guide engineers at various levels, both formally through structured mentorship and informally through code reviews and technical consultations.
- Identify, define, and execute strategic technical initiatives, transforming abstract problems into actionable, high-impact projects.
- Collaborate extensively across multiple engineering teams, advocating for consistent patterns, tooling improvements, and standardized solutions.
- Lead comprehensive cross-functional system design reviews, proactively identifying systemic risks, performance bottlenecks, and opportunities for enhancing developer experience.
- Champion continuous learning, proactively introducing new technologies, methodologies, and industry trends to strengthen Zoro's technical capabilities.
- Act as a trusted advisor to technology leadership, adapting communication style to the audience to help drive sound technical executive decisions.
- Direct complex, cross-functional rapid responses to production incidents; proactively driving systemic improvements, influencing strategic operational practices, and ensuring high reliability across critical platform services.
- Evaluate, prototype, and introduce AI-assisted engineering practices that measurably improve developer productivity, code quality, documentation standards, and operational resilience across multiple teams.
Minimum Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
- 10+ years of professional experience in software development, particularly in backend, platform, or infrastructure roles
- Expert proficiency in multiple programming languages such as Python, Java, TypeScript, or equivalent
- Proven track record of designing, building, testing, and operating complex, distributed, cloud-native systems using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
- Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus), and container orchestration systems (Kubernetes, Cloud Run)
- Excellent strategic communication skills, with a proven ability to clearly articulate complex technical strategies and trade-offs
- Experience safely integrating AI-assisted development tools into professional engineering workflows with measurable improvements in developer effectiveness, code quality, and reliability
Preferred Qualifications- Significant experience influencing organizational technical roadmaps and advocating for engineering standards and best practices
- Active participation in external tech communities, conferences, or continuous learning initiatives
- Extensive experience mentoring senior-level engineers and fostering technical leadership skills across an organization
- Demonstrated expertise in leading technical responses during complex, cross-team incidents, and proactively driving systemic improvements
- Experience leading cross-team adoption of AI-enabled engineering workflows, providing internal guidance, patterns, or standards
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
$139,800-$233,100 USD
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.
