Jose Zenteno
Data & AI Leader | Adjunct Professor
United States
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 environments. 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 University, 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 practices to deliver enterprise cloud data products.
- Acted as lead technical advisor for Macro-Infrastructure Transformation, authoring strategic briefs that influenced executive alignment for a corporate migration to GCP, architecting a real-time data foundation handling 2 billion requests per day.
- Pioneered the democratization of streaming and batch ingestion frameworks, enabling distributed teams to deploy pipelines via YAML/SQL configurations and reducing engineering overhead by 60%.
- 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, yielding $1.3M in annual savings and reducing 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 hot-fix 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 from the ML-powered PPOD audits and the $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
"This course helped me go from no SQL knowledge to a level where I am able to understand the code and apply it into my job."
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%
Encouraged Participation
"Professor Zenteno did a great job incorporating real-world scenarios into this class by showing how much impact Python has in our day-to-day and the business world."
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
FedEx
Sr. Data Scientist
May 2021 – May 2023- Engineered a proactive anomaly detection platform to identify package fraud, averting an estimated <strong>$100M in annual revenue losses</strong> and saving <strong>375,000 operational hours</strong>.
- Managed the Pick-up & Delivery data science program, delivering 8 enterprise data products and co-architecting a self-service data warehouse scaling to over <strong>18 billion records</strong>.
- Mined big data telemetry to isolate a critical scanner software anomaly, reclaiming <strong>$3M in annual savings</strong> by closing a process gap causing contractor overpayments.
Core Tech Stack: Python, Big Data Telemetry, Data Warehousing, Risk Mitigation
Data Scientist
Sept 2018 – May 2020- Engineered an automated, self-service data ingestion framework to accelerate cloud adoption and upskill engineering teams.
- Directed on-premise 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
Nestle USA
Sr. Data Scientist
May 2020 – May 2021- Consulted and led technical teams in architecting enterprise platform constructions 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, optimizing multi-department operational efficiency.
Core Tech Stack: Databricks, Power BI, Advanced Analytics
Northwestern Mutual
Analytics and Research Consultant
May 2016 – Sept 2018- Served as 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
Fiscal and Economic Research Center
Research Analyst
March 2013 – 2016- Authored advanced multivariate regression models regarding rural broadband deployment.
- Findings directly guided state funding allocations and were cited by The Wall Street Journal.
Core Tech Stack: Econometric Modeling, Multivariate Regression
Nucamp Bootcamp
Lead Computer Science & Analytics Instructor
Jan 2020 – Dec 2023- 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 <strong>4.8 / 5.0</strong>.
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