Director, Platform Engineering - Foundational Engineering

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!

Job Summary:

The Foundational Engineering group’s mission is to enable engineering teams to build, ship, and operate software safely and efficiently. They do so by building shared platforms, automation, and guardrails that reduce friction, manage risk, and scale productivity more rapidly than headcount. Zoro’s engineering teams own their cloud infrastructure, and Foundational Engineering helps them do it effectively.

As the Director of Platform Engineering for Zoro’s Foundational Engineering team, you set and execute the strategic technical direction across core platform infrastructure and services. You use deep engineering expertise to drive clear architectural trade-offs that align with company strategy, ensuring platforms are reliable, scalable, secure, operable, and thoroughly tested, with strong compliance posture.

This position reports to the Sr. Director of Foundational Engineering and is a hybrid role, requiring at least two days per week in our Chicago office.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership and Technical Direction:
• Define and drive the platform technical vision aligned to business objectives and long-term strategy.
• Lead and influence critical architectural decisions for scalable, secure, reliable platforms compliant with PCI/SOX/NIST.
• Maintain hands-on technical credibility to guide key engineering work and POCs.
• Ensure architecture principles, patterns, and standards are documented and adopted through paved paths and tooling, not centralized approval gates.
• Act as the escalation point for unresolved trade-offs where business outcomes, risk tolerance, cost, and sustainability must be balanced.
• Remain accountable for the quality and consequences of architectural decisions, even when day-to-day design ownership is delegated to Staff Engineers and Technical Product Managers.
  
  
• Organizational and Team Development:
• Lead and develop multiple teams, building an inclusive, high-performing culture centered on engineering excellence and rigorous testing.
• Mentor engineering managers and senior technical leaders; build a sustainable leadership pipeline.
  
  
• Operational Excellence:
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery practices, testing discipline, reliability, productivity, and tech-debt reduction.
• Manage capacity to maximize team effectiveness and delivery outcomes.
• Evaluate strategic vendors and manage contracts; own platform/infrastructure spend for cost-effective outcomes.
• Continually improve engineering excellence and productivity by effectively leveraging AI-tooling to reduce toil, improve quality, and enhance engineering capabilities without compromising verification or operational safety.

• Executive and Cross-functional Collaboration:
• Communicate platform strategy, priorities, and outcomes to executives and stakeholders, adapting to audience technical depth and raising it through clear education.
• Align leaders across engineering and adjacent teams to deliver coherent solutions to complex organizational challenges.
• Partner effectively with compliance partners to manage audits and establish best practices that adhere to policies without compromising engineering flexibility and effectiveness.
  
  
• Incident Management and Reliability:
• Champion proactive monitoring, incident management, systemic improvements, and operational accountability.
• Participate in the technology executive on-call rotation to remove blockers and prioritize production issues.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams
• Extensive expertise in cloud-native architectures, platform services, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation
• Proven ability to define and execute strategy tied to measurable business outcomes
• Experience owning budgets, vendor negotiations, and contracts for platform/infrastructure services
• Track record of embedding t