Jose Zenteno

Data & AI Leader

jose.zenteno.datascience@gmail.com (262) 510-5691 linkedin.com/in/josezenteno josezenteno.com
Jose Zenteno

Professional Summary

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 environments. Trusted advisor to executive leadership, driving 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, transitioning legacy data footprints into high-velocity, real-time pipelines ready for enterprise Agentic AI. Combines enterprise leadership with a passion for talent development as an Adjunct Professor at Bucknell and Marquette University, actively training and preparing a future-ready technical workforce.

Core Competencies & Executive Value

Executive Advisory & Practice Leadership

  • • Multi-Cloud Program Governance
  • • Change Management
  • • Strategic Risk Mitigation & AI Governance
  • • Strategic Roadmapping & Budget Management

Technical Direction & AI Architecture

  • • Multi-Agent Systems & Google ADK
  • • Apache Beam Real-Time Streaming
  • • Declarative Batch Ingestion Orchestration
  • • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems

Product Delivery & Business Outcomes

  • • Cloud FinOps & Value Realization
  • • C-Suite Executive Decision Briefings
  • • Continuous Integration (GitHub Actions)
  • • AI-Assisted Software Engineering (SDLC)

Professional Experience

FEDERAL EXPRESS (GCP & Azure Portfolio)

May 2023 – Present
Manager of Data and AI – Last Mile Delivery Operations

Leading the strategic technical implementation of the Last Mile and Customer Experience Data and AI Practice, managing full P&L, and spearheading cross-functional engineering practices to deliver 21 enterprise cloud data products and $100M+ in value.

Executive Advisory & Cloud Democratization

  • Macro-Infrastructure Transformation: Acted as lead technical advisor to the SVP of Data & AI, authoring strategic briefs that influenced executive alignment to drive a corporate migration to GCP, and establishing a real-time data foundation to stream over 2 billion records per day.
  • Framework Democratization: Pioneered the democratization of streaming and batch ingestion frameworks across the Data Foundation to accelerate cloud migrations; enabled distributed teams to securely deploy AI-ready pipelines via declarative YAML/SQL configurations, reducing engineering overhead by 90%.

Technical Direction & AI Architecture

  • Autonomous FinOps Platform (BQ Cost Agent): Designed an AI-powered Multi-Agent System (MAS) using Gemini APIs and Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK). The platform autonomously parses BigQuery Information Schema logs and jobs to detect query inefficiencies, leveraging LLMs to generate context-aware SQL recommendations and capturing $1M+ in annual cloud cost reductions.
  • Real-Time Data Streaming Foundation: Engineered a real-time streaming data platform using the Apache Beam Python SDK to ingest P&D events. Implemented Pub/Sub as an asynchronous surge shock absorber, stateful Dataflow workers for real-time deduplication, and a sub-millisecond Bigtable lookup layer to deliver denormalized BigQuery wide tables for immediate AI consumption on a $25/day execution cost.
  • AI-Driven Compliance Automation: Architected an event-driven, high-throughput machine learning pipeline using Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and Cloud Run to automate PPOD audits. Programmatically evaluated 6 million delivery photos and executed 1 million optimized Gemini API calls daily, yielding $1.3M in annual run-rate savings and decreasing delivery disputes by 12%.

Crisis Forensics & Post-Incident Architecture

  • Global Revenue Protection: Discovered a critical system hardware flaw and quantified its downstream impact by mapping corrupted telemetry data to machine learning models and APIs. Synthesized these findings for technical leadership, driving the buy-in needed to execute a network-wide hot-fix that safeguarded $30M in recurring revenue across elite retail accounts (Walmart, Best Buy, Chewy).

Awards & Recognition

  • Executive Bravo Zulu Award (FY 2026): Awarded for leading post-incident forensics on a scanner telemetry logic flaw, successfully safeguarding $30M in digital revenue.
  • Global Security Culture Champion (FY 2024): Selected as the sole global recipient for engineering network-wide threat mitigation frameworks, recognized for systematically reducing infrastructure risk exposure via the proactive alerting platform.
  • Two Purple Promise Quality Awards (FY 2024): Honored twice for exceptional business impact, specifically driving the ML-powered PPOD audits and the $100M fraud prevention system.
  • Five Star Award (FY 2023): Earned FedEx’s highest corporate honor for technical innovation by identifying a vulnerability and eliminating $3M in annual contractor overpayments.

Academic Leadership & Talent Development

BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY

Jan 2025 – Present
Adjunct Professor – Data Analytics: SQL, Cloud & AI
  • Advanced Technical Curriculum Design: Architecting a modern syllabus that integrated foundational relational databases with Google BigQuery cloud data warehousing and Generative AI (Gemini) pipelines.
  • Enterprise-to-Classroom Integration: Partnered with Google to embed the Google Cloud Data Analytics Professional Certificate into the curriculum. Leveraged FedEx executive experience to translate real-world analytics and AI use cases into hands-on labs, which students praised as being "highly relevant to the workforce today".
  • Spring 2026 Evaluation ↗: Secured an outstanding 93.3% survey response rate, with 92.8% of students rating the instruction as highly effective and confirming the course significantly developed their ability to link cloud architecture and Gen AI to solve complex analytical problems.

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY

Jan 2020 – Present
Adjunct Professor – Python Programming
  • Agentic AI & Hands-On Focus: Engineered and delivered specialized graduate-level curriculum covering automated python programming, machine learning, and hands-on Agentic AI implementations.
  • Spring 2026 Evaluation ↗: Achieved an 84.6% student response rate. Highly praised in written reviews for exceptional organization, the inclusion of practical business-oriented projects, and presenting complex AI and data structures in a highly comprehensible, digestible format.

Prior Professional Experience

FEDERAL EXPRESS

May 2021 – May 2023
Sr. Data Scientist
  • Enterprise Alerting & Resource Optimization: Engineered a proactive anomaly detection platform to identify and mitigate package fraud. Designed data pipelines triggering targeted field actions, successfully averting an estimated $100M in annual revenue losses and saving 375,000 operational hours (187 FTEs).
  • P&D Analytics & Data Warehousing: Managed the Pick-up & Delivery data science program team, delivering 8 enterprise data products in FY2023. Co-architected a self-service P&D data warehouse scaling to over 18 billion records, empowering 100+ product features that enhanced driver visibility and brand equity.
  • Cross-Functional Risk Mitigation: Mined big data telemetry to isolate a critical scanner software anomaly responsible for $3M in annual contractor overpayments. Partnered with IT, Finance, and Legal divisions to drive the remediation strategy, permanently closing the process gap and reclaiming $3M in annual savings.

NESTLÉ USA

May 2020 – May 2021
Sr. Data Scientist
  • Enterprise Platform Construction: Led external consulting teams and internal data engineers in architecting Nestlé's end-to-end enterprise insights data warehouse utilizing Databricks and Power BI.
  • Strategic Analytics Adoption: Collaborated with executive sponsors across Supply Chain, Sales, and HR to deploy and scale data-driven behavioral datasets, optimizing multi-department operational efficiency.

FEDERAL EXPRESS

Sept 2018 – May 2020
Data Scientist
  • Cloud Democratization & Data Ingestion: Engineered an automated, self-service data ingestion framework capable of ingesting data from core FedEx servers. Facilitated cloud adoption workshops that accelerated cross-OpCo product development and upskilled engineering teams.
  • Legacy Modernization & Real-Time BI: Directed on-premise to cloud data migrations and optimized data warehouse architectures using a custom cross-cloud (GCP/Azure) integration framework. By seamlessly unifying disparate multi-server sources, revolutionized enterprise analytics—replacing legacy daily SAS and Business Objects reports with dynamic, near real-time dashboards.

NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL

May 2016 – Sept 2018
Analytics and Research Consultant
  • Data-Driven Budget Optimization: Served as lead advisor to optimize a multi-million dollar financial training budget; designed and deployed Tableau and Power BI analytical tools to guide executive change management.

FISCAL AND ECONOMIC RESEARCH CENTER

March 2013 – May 2016
Research Analyst
  • Strategic Econometric Modeling: Authored advanced multivariate regression models regarding rural broadband deployment; findings guided state funding allocations and were cited by The Wall Street Journal ↗.

NUCAMP BOOTCAMP

Jan 2020 – Dec 2023
Lead Computer Science & Analytics Instructor
  • Professional Technical Upskilling: Personally trained and upskilled 200+ technology and corporate professionals in Python backend programming, automated data pipelines, and SQL programming. Maintained an elite, verified instructor rating of 4.8 / 5.0.

Education

Marquette University

Master of Science, Applied Economics (GPA: 3.5 / 4.0)

University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

Bachelor of Business Administration, Economics
Summa Cum Laude (GPA: 3.86 / 4.0)