Jose Zenteno

Data & AI Leader

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

Professional Summary

Visionary Data & AI Leader with over 13 years of experience leading data and AI initiatives, target architecture roadmaps, and multi-million dollar data product strategies across Fortune 500 companies. Proven leader driving organizational transformation by defining self-service, cloud-native architectural standards and governance frameworks. Track record of setting the execution pace for multi-disciplinary data science and engineering organizations, accelerating time-to-market for scalable data pipelines and Agentic AI platforms. Combines enterprise leadership with a passion for talent development as an Adjunct Professor at Bucknell and Marquette Universities, actively training and preparing a future-ready technical workforce.

Core Competencies & Strategic Leadership

Strategic Vision & Practice Leadership

  • • Enterprise AI Vision & Roadmapping
  • • Cloud Platform Adoption & Governance
  • • Organizational Change Management

Target Architecture & AI Direction

  • • Google Agent Development Kit
  • • Real-Time Streaming Architecture
  • • Declarative Ingestion Orchestration
  • • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Portfolio Delivery & Business Outcomes

  • • Enterprise FinOps & Value Realization
  • • Senior Leadership & Board Briefings
  • • CI/CD & Enterprise DevOps Governance
  • • AI-Assisted SDLC Strategy

Professional Experience

FEDERAL EXPRESS

May 2023 – Present
Manager, Data Science

Establishing strategic vision, architectural standards, and execution velocity for enterprise Data and AI initiatives; leading cross-functional engineering teams to deliver enterprise cloud platforms and over $100M+ in realized business value.

Strategic Vision & Cloud Transformation

  • Enterprise GCP Adoption & Cloud Enablement: Influenced data and AI practitioners to adopt Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by championing adoption and education frameworks, empowering engineering teams with target architecture strategies, and establishing scalable governance frameworks to accelerate cloud-native transformation.
  • Cross-Functional AI Adoption & Enterprise Enablement: Partnered with InfoSec, IT, and delivery teams to govern and deploy Gemini Enterprise capabilities across the organization, expanding AI-driven general productivity and establishing an enterprise AI portal to accelerate cross-functional AI adoption.
  • Enterprise Framework Governance & Velocity: Defined and governed standardized streaming and batch ingestion frameworks across the Data Foundation to accelerate cloud adoption; enabled distributed engineering teams to securely deploy AI-ready pipelines via declarative YAML/SQL configurations, reducing operational engineering overhead by 90%.

Enterprise AI Architecture & FinOps Governance

  • Autonomous FinOps Architecture (BQ Cost Agent): Architected an enterprise-grade Multi-Agent System (MAS) leveraging Gemini APIs and Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) to automate cost governance. The platform continuously monitors BigQuery Information Schema logs, applying context-aware SQL optimizations that unlocked $880K in savings during week one with an anticipated 7-8-figure annual cost reduction.
  • Target Real-Time Data Streaming Architecture: Spearheaded the architectural blueprint and operational standards for a real-time streaming platform using the Apache Beam Python SDK. Formulated an asynchronous surge-absorption architecture via Pub/Sub, stateful Dataflow deduplication workers, and sub-millisecond Bigtable lookups to serve denormalized BigQuery wide tables for immediate AI consumption at a $75/day run rate.
  • Hybrid Vision Architecture & API Cost Optimization: Championed a tiered vision architecture using a lightweight, open-weight model to evaluate peak loads of nearly 300 images per second at sub-second latency. Set governance guidelines to intelligently route only 5% of edge photos to Gemini for advanced classification, reducing frontier API expenditure by $1.8M annually while auditing 6–10M daily delivery photos—driving a 12% drop in delivery disputes and saving $1.4M in vendor operational costs.

STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT & SYSTEM FORENSICS

  • Revenue Protection & Risk Remediation: Uncovered a critical telemetry software defect and spearheaded forensic analysis linking corrupted data to downstream ML models and APIs. Presented tactical remediation strategies to senior leadership, driving cross-functional alignment for a global hot-fix that preserved $30M in recurring annual revenue across major accounts (Walmart, Best Buy, Chewy).

Awards & Recognition

  • Five Star Award (FY 2026): Honored with the FedEx Five Star Award, the company's highest individual and team honor, for exemplary leadership, technical vision, and cloud architecture delivery.
  • Leadership Bravo Zulu Award (FY 2026): Awarded for leading post-incident forensics on scanner telemetry logic, safeguarding $30M in digital revenue.
  • Global Security Culture Champion (FY 2024): Named sole global recipient for conceiving a last-mile risk management platform that alerted field leadership and security officers to compromised shipments—mitigating inventory loss and winning back a $100M+ shipper account.
  • Two Purple Promise Quality Awards (FY 2024): Recognized for impact in guiding ML-driven PPOD audits and the enterprise $100M fraud and loss prevention framework.
  • Five Star Award (FY 2023): Received the FedEx Five Star Award for architecting solutions that eliminated $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: Designed a modern syllabus integrating Google Cloud Data and AI tools, focusing on enterprise data analytics, data warehousing, and Generative AI pipelines.
  • Enterprise-to-Classroom Integration: Bridged academic theory with industry practices by instructing students on leveraging LLMs and Gemini for sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and data enrichment within Google BigQuery.
  • Spring 2026 Evaluation ↗: Achieved a 93% effective instruction rating. Course praised for practical relevance and developing students' ability to link cloud architecture and Generative AI to solve complex business problems.

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY

Jan 2020 – Present
Adjunct Professor – Python Programming
  • Industry-Focused Curriculum: Taught industry-standard data science workflows utilizing Python and Pandas for complex data manipulation, cleansing, missing value treatment, and DataFrame operations.
  • Spring 2026 Evaluation ↗: Achieved a ~91% effective instruction rating, recognized for clear presentation of complex data structures and practical, business-oriented projects.

Prior Professional Experience

NUCAMP BOOTCAMP

Jan 2020 – Dec 2023
Computer Science & Analytics Instructor
  • Technical Upskilling: Upskilled 200+ professionals in Python backend development, automated data pipelines, and SQL programming. Maintained an instructor rating of 4.8 / 5.0.

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 pipelines triggering targeted field actions, averting an estimated $100M in annual revenue losses.
  • P&D Analytics & Data Warehousing: Led the Pick-up & Delivery data science 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.
  • Cross-Functional Risk Mitigation: Mined big data telemetry to isolate a critical scanner software anomaly responsible for contractor overpayments. Partnered with IT, Finance, and Legal teams to drive remediation, permanently closing the process gap and reclaiming $3M in annual savings.

NESTLÉ USA

May 2020 – May 2021
Sr. Data Scientist
  • Enterprise Platform Construction: Guided engineering teams and internal data engineers in architecting Nestlé's end-to-end enterprise insights data warehouse utilizing Databricks and Power BI.
  • Strategic Analytics Adoption: Partnered with business leaders across Supply Chain, Sales, and HR to deploy scalable data-driven behavioral analytics, driving multi-department operational efficiency.

FEDERAL EXPRESS

Sept 2018 – May 2020
Data Scientist
  • Cloud Democratization & Data Ingestion: Engineered an automated, self-service data ingestion framework to pull from legacy core servers. Led technical workshops that accelerated cross-organizational cloud adoption and pipeline modernization.
  • Legacy Modernization & Real-Time BI: Directed on-premise to cloud data migrations using a custom cross-cloud integration framework. Modernized enterprise analytics by replacing legacy daily SAS reports with dynamic, near real-time dashboards.

NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL

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

FISCAL AND ECONOMIC RESEARCH CENTER

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

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)