Sr. Technical Product Manager - Foundational Engineering
Senior Technical Product Manager shaping product strategy for Zoro's Foundational Engineering teams (Cloud Platform on GCP and Software Delivery Platform), running discovery with internal engineering customers, prioritizing platform investments, and driving adoption of developer tooling across the SDLC. Core tech: GCP, containerization, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD.
- Compensation
- $139.8K–$233.1K / yr
- Location
- Chicago, Illinois, United States
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Category
- Product
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 years focused on technical or platform products (developer tools, infrastructure, internal platforms)
- Hands-on technical background — built software or worked closely with infrastructure and cloud environments
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystems — familiarity with GCP (or comparable hyperscaler), containerization, infrastructure-as-code, modern software delivery practices
- Strong product instincts for internal customers — run discovery with engineers, translate pain points into product requirements, define success where adoption is not mandated
- Structured prioritization and roadmap management skills — long-term vision with pragmatic near-term decisions and clear trade-off communication
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration — influencing without authority, aligning engineering, platform, and leadership stakeholders
Nice to have
- Experience with GCP services (GKE, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, etc.) or comparable AWS/Azure equivalents
- Familiarity with platform engineering concepts — internal developer platforms (IDPs), golden paths, platform-as-product
- Experience at a company with a distinct platform/product engineering split
- Background with developer experience (DevEx) measurement frameworks
Full description
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!
About the role
Zoro's Foundational Engineering group builds the platform that lets our engineering and data teams move fast and ship reliably. Two teams sit at the core of this: Cloud Platform, which owns our GCP infrastructure and the self-service tooling that gives product teams control of their cloud footprint, and Software Delivery Platform, which owns the end-to-end developer tooling that spans local development, ephemeral testing environments, integration and load testing, and CI/CD automation.
We're looking for a Senior Technical Product Manager to bring product discipline to these platform-as-product efforts. This is a greenfield opportunity to establish how we define, prioritize, and measure investment in engineering infrastructure — with direct influence over the pace and quality at which hundreds of engineers deliver software.
Why this role
This is a high-visibility, high-impact position with real whitespace. Platform engineering at Zoro is mature enough to have strong teams and meaningful infrastructure, but early enough in its product thinking that the person who takes this role will shape how we do it — the discovery process, the roadmap cadence, the success metrics, the relationship with engineering customers. If you want to build the product discipline for engineering infrastructure rather than inherit it, this is that role.
What you'll do
- Strategy & Roadmap
- Establish and maintain a unified product strategy and roadmap across Cloud Platform and Software Delivery Platform, grounded in the needs of your internal engineering customers.
- Translate platform capabilities into a coherent, self-service SDLC experience that reduces friction from local development through production deployment.
- Define how platform investment connects to measurable engineering outcomes — developer velocity, deployment frequency, reliability, and adoption.
- Discovery & Prioritization
- Build and run a continuous discovery process with internal customers (product engineering, data engineering) to surface unmet needs, pain points, and adoption barriers.
- Maintain a prioritized backlog that balances strategic capability-building with near-term engineering customer needs.
- Partner with engineering leads to evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and platform architecture choices through a product lens.