Jose Zenteno
Data & AI Leader | Adjunct Professor
Lewisburg, PA
About Me
I am a forward-thinking Data & AI Leader with over 13 years of experience spearheading multi-million-dollar data product strategies and high-stakes cloud transformations across Fortune 500 companies. As a trusted advisor to executive leadership, I drive organizational agility by architecting self-service, cloud-native frameworks and automating secure pipeline orchestration.
Highly skilled in mobilizing cross-functional data science and engineering divisions, I transition legacy data footprints into high-velocity, real-time pipelines ready for enterprise Agentic AI. I also combine enterprise leadership with a passion for talent development as an Adjunct Professor at Bucknell and Marquette universities, where I actively train and prepare a future-ready technical workforce.
Professional Experience
FedEx
Manager of Data and AI – Last Mile Delivery Operations
May 2023 – Present- Lead the strategic technical implementation of the Last Mile and Customer Experience Data and AI Practice, spearheading cross-functional engineering initiatives to deliver enterprise cloud data products.
- Acted as the lead technical advisor for Macro-Infrastructure Transformation, authoring strategic briefs that influenced executive alignment for a corporate migration to GCP and architecting a real-time data foundation.
- Pioneered the democratization of streaming and batch ingestion frameworks, enabling distributed teams to deploy pipelines via YAML and SQL configurations, which reduced engineering overhead by 90%.
- Designed an AI-powered Multi-Agent System (Agentic AI) Autonomous FinOps Platform leveraging Gemini APIs and BigQuery to detect query inefficiencies and generate cost-saving recommendations.
- Engineered a real-time data streaming foundation utilizing the Apache Beam Python SDK, Pub/Sub, and Dataflow for stateful transformations and sub-second Bigtable lookups.
- Architected an event-driven machine learning pipeline for AI-driven compliance automation via Cloud Run, programmatically executing 1 million optimized Gemini API calls daily. This yielded $1.3M in annual savings and reduced delivery disputes by 12%.
- Led crisis forensics for Global Revenue Protection, diagnosing a critical system hardware flaw and synthesizing findings to execute a network-wide hotfix that safeguarded $30M in revenue across major retail accounts.
Core Tech Stack: GCP, Azure, BigQuery, Gemini API, Apache Beam, Python, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud Run, Agentic AI
Awards & Recognition
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Executive Bravo Zulu Award (FY 2026): Safeguarded $30M in digital revenue by leading post-incident forensics on a critical scanner telemetry flaw.
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Global Security Culture Champion (FY 2024): Sole global recipient for engineering network-wide threat mitigation frameworks.
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Two Purple Promise Quality Awards (FY 2024): Honored for exceptional business impact resulting from ML-powered PPOD audits and a $100M fraud prevention system.
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Five Star Award (FY 2023): Earned FedEx’s highest corporate honor for eliminating $3M in annual contractor overpayments.
Academic Experience
Bucknell University
Instructor, ANOP 242: Data Analytics - SQL, Cloud, AI
Curriculum & Industry Focus
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Taught fundamental and advanced database concepts, including relational database design, data integrity, and complex SQL programming (joins, subqueries, and window functions).
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Pioneered the intersection of Generative AI and data analytics by teaching students to leverage LLMs and Gemini for SQL generation, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and data enrichment within Google BigQuery.
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Aligned academic coursework directly with industry standards by integrating the Google Cloud Data Analytics Professional Certificate into the curriculum, giving students hands-on experience with cloud data warehousing.
93%
Effective Instruction
"His material is highly relevant to the workforce today. He is an approachable, hard-working, and considerate professor who brings unique industry expertise."
Marquette University
Instructor, ECON 6118-701: Introduction to Python
Curriculum & Industry Focus
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Instructed students in core Python programming, object-oriented concepts, and essential data structures via a cloud-based Jupyter Notebook environment.
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Focused heavily on industry-standard data science workflows, utilizing the Pandas library for complex data manipulation, cleaning, missing value treatment, and merging DataFrames.
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Guided students through full-lifecycle data projects, from Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and accessing web APIs/databases, to building predictive classification and regression models using Scikit-Learn.
~91%
Effective Instruction
"This class was a great introduction to how AI agents operate and how to implement them in a real-world setting. The examples were fun to see and were engaging."
Academic Leadership & Talent Development
Beyond corporate leadership, I am deeply committed to shaping the next generation of technical talent. As an Adjunct Professor at Bucknell University, I design hands-on curricula integrating Google Cloud and GenAI. At Marquette University, I teach Python and Agentic AI, grounding students in data structures, EDA, API integration, and framework development via the Google ADK. Previously, as Lead Computer Science Instructor at Nucamp Bootcamp, I mentored and upskilled over 200 professionals in Python, data structures, and automated data pipelines.
Prior Experience
Fiscal and Economic Research Center
Research Analyst
March 2013 – 2016- Authored advanced multivariate regression models analyzing rural broadband deployment.
- Findings directly guided state funding allocations and were cited by The Wall Street Journal.
Core Tech Stack: Econometric Modeling, Multivariate Regression
Northwestern Mutual
Analytics and Research Consultant
May 2016 – Sept 2018- Served as the lead advisor to optimize a multi-million-dollar financial training budget.
- Designed and deployed analytical models to guide executive change management strategies.
Core Tech Stack: Data Analysis, Financial Modeling, Strategy
Nestle USA
Sr. Data Scientist
May 2020 – May 2021- Consulted and led technical teams in architecting enterprise platforms and data pipelines utilizing Databricks and Power BI.
- Drove strategic analytics adoption by partnering with executive leadership to deploy large-scale, data-driven behavioral datasets, ultimately optimizing multi-department operational efficiency.
Core Tech Stack: Databricks, Power BI, Advanced Analytics
FedEx
Data Scientist
Sept 2018 – May 2020- Engineered an automated, self-service data ingestion framework to accelerate cloud adoption and upskill engineering teams.
- Directed on-premises to cloud data migrations, replacing legacy SAS and Business Objects reports with dynamic, near-real-time dashboards using a custom cross-cloud integration framework.
Core Tech Stack: GCP, Azure, SQL, Business Objects, Cloud Data Warehousing
Sr. Data Scientist
May 2021 – May 2023- Engineered a proactive anomaly detection platform to identify package fraud, averting an estimated $100M in annual revenue losses and saving 375,000 operational hours.
- Managed the Pick-up & Delivery data science program, delivering 8 enterprise data products and co-architecting a self-service data warehouse that scaled to over 18 billion records.
- Mined big data telemetry to isolate a critical scanner software anomaly, reclaiming $3M in annual savings by closing a process gap that caused contractor overpayments.
Core Tech Stack: Python, Big Data Telemetry, Data Warehousing, Risk Mitigation
Nucamp Bootcamp
Lead Computer Science & Analytics Instructor
Jan 2020 – Dec 2023- Upskilled 200+ technology and corporate professionals in Python backend programming, automated data pipelines, and SQL.
- Maintained an elite, verified instructor rating of 4.8 / 5.0.
Core Tech Stack: Python, SQL, Data Pipelines, Curriculum Development
Education
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Master of Science in Applied Economics
Completed
Focus: Applied Economics and Quantitative Methods
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Bachelor of Business Administration
Completed