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!
Position Description
As a Senior Software Engineer II on the Buy Product Engineering Team, you will work across our Buy experience and services, building Buy experiences and services that help customers complete their orders with confidence. You will own the full stack behind a critical moment in the customer journey - from responsive web interfaces to the services that submit, confirm, and recover orders - so every purchase is fast, accessible, and reliable.
This is an end-to-end senior individual contributor role. You will independently own complex, well-scoped projects from technical design through production measurement, building polished web experiences and the APIs, integrations, and data flows behind them. You will partner closely with product, UX, analytics, platform, and adjacent commerce teams to make the purchase flow simpler and more reliable for every customer.
Buy Product Engineering is your home team. As business priorities require, you may also take on focused assignments that support adjacent customer-facing teams, including SEO and Engage. In those assignments, you will bring the same full-stack ownership, customer focus, and collaborative approach while working in the context of that team's goals and systems.
What You Will Do
- Own complex full-stak initiatives across cart, checkout, and order confirmation, from technical design through production measurement.
- Build intuitive, accessible, and performant customer experiences using TypeScript and React, Vue, or a comparable modern web framework.
- Design and operate resilient APIs and services for purchase state, payment handoff, order submission, and confirmation.
- Engineer for the realities of a transaction flow: safe retries, clear failure states, idempotent behavior, dependency timeouts, and graceful recovery.
- Break ambiguous customer and business problems into sound technical approaches, thoughtful tradeoffs, and incremental delivery plans.
- Use feature flags, experiments, observability, and customer behavior data to improve completion, reliability, and ease of use.
- Partner with product, UX, analytics, platform, and dependent teams to deliver cohesive customer outcomes.
- Contribute to high-priority work for SEO and Engage when business needs call for additional engineering capacity or expertise.
- Raise the bar through pragmatic code reviews, strong testing practices, clear documentation, and mentoring.
What Success Looks Like
- Customers can move from cart to completed order through a fast, accessible, and understandable purchase flow.
- Your systems are observable, well-tested, secure, and dependable under real-world traffic and failure conditions.
- You deliver project-level work with clear technical decisions, measurable outcomes, and strong operational readiness.
- The engineers around you become more effective because of the standards, context, and mentorship you provide.
What You Bring
- 7+ years of experience building and operating customer-facing full-stack web applications at meaningful scale.
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript or JavaScript and experience delivering production applications in React, Vue, or a comparable modern framework.
- Strong backend engineering skills with Python and API/service development; Django or Flask experience is a plus.
- Experience building reliable, stateful workflows and integrating with services where correctness, recovery, and clear failure behavior matter.
- Experience designing systems that use relational and distributed data stores, asynchronous workflows, and cloud-native delivery practices.
- Practical understanding of web performance, accessibility, testing, observability, CI/CD, security, and privacy.
- Demonstrated judgment in system design: you can balance customer value, technical risk, delivery speed, and long-term maintainability.
- Clear, collaborative communication and a habit of using data and customer outcomes to guide decisions.
Preferred Experience
- Experience with cart, checkout, payments, order management, or other transaction-heavy customer workflows.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or comparable technologies.
- Experience working with experimentation platforms, product analytics, feature flags, and measurable customer outcomes.
How We Work
We value ownership, practical judgment, and learning in the open. The strongest candidates are customer-minded builders who care about craft, can collaborate across disciplines, and are equally comfortable improving an existing system or creating a new path when the problem calls for it.
Total Rewards
Zoro’s total compensation plan includes our Zoro Incentive Plan (ZIP) that is designed to foster and reward our team members for strong performance. Total compensation will be highly competitive.
In addition to competitive compensation, Zoro offers comprehensive benefits and perks including:
- Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment
- Maternity support programs, nursing benefits, and up to 14 weeks paid leave for birth parents and up to 4 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents. We also support growing your family through access to adoption assistance program
- 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist and Wellhub portal membership to support your mental and emotional wellbeing
- At least 18 paid time off days annually for full-time employees and 6 company holidays per year
- 6% company contribution to a 401K Retirement Savings Plan each pay period, no employee contribution required
- Tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing and access to financial counseling, education, and tools
- Charitable Gift Program - match gift to an eligible educational, cultural, community health, and human service organizations
- Employee discounts and admission to various civic and cultural institutions around Chicago
- Zoro office perks including coffee bar, beer on tap, unlimited snacks, access to the onsite gym, and incredible city skyline views
For additional information and details regarding our benefits and our parent company, W. W. Grainger, please click on the link here.
The pay range provided is not a guarantee of compensation. The range listed reflects the expected base pay for this position at the time of posting, based on the role's job grade. Actual compensation may vary depending on factors such as location, relevant experience and individual qualifications.
Our Culture
Zoro was founded in 2011 with a simple idea: make it easy for businesses to get the tools, parts, and supplies they need to keep things running. We've grown by staying curious, moving quickly, and solving everyday challenges in smart, practical ways. Backed by W.W. Grainger and inspired by our endless assortment business model, we’re on a clear path toward our next big milestone: $2 billion in revenue—and beyond.
At Zoro, we don’t just follow a playbook—we help build it. You’ll get to work on real problems with a supportive team that shares ideas freely, learns from each other, and celebrates wins together. Our culture is grounded in values that guide how we show up every day: Winning & Learning Together, Being Customer Obsessed, Being Transparent, and Taking Ownership. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re always asking good questions.
Zoro’s culture has been recognized by Fortune, Best Places to Work, and Built In Chicago—but the recognition we care about most comes from our team members, who make this place what it is.
We also know that flexibility matters. Our hybrid work model gives you space to focus and the flexibility to live your life — asking team members to be onsite at least two days a week. Our Chicago HQ (right above Ogilvie Transportation Center in the Accenture Tower) is always open and ready for connection, collaboration, or just a good cup of coffee.
At Zoro, we’re growing fast toward big aspirations — and we’re continuously excited about the new challenges we get to solve together.
We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are also committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible work environment that includes both providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process as well as throughout the course of one’s employment. Should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, including, but not limited to use of our website, any part of the application, interview, or hiring process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.
Skills Required
- 7+ years of experience building and operating customer-facing full-stack web applications at meaningful scale
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript or JavaScript
- Production application experience with React, Vue, or a comparable modern web framework
- Strong backend engineering skills with Python and API or service development
- Experience building reliable, stateful workflows and integrating services requiring correctness, recovery, and clear failure behavior
- Experience designing systems using relational and distributed data stores, asynchronous workflows, and cloud-native delivery practices
- Practical understanding of web performance, accessibility, testing, observability, CI/CD, security, and privacy
- Demonstrated system design judgment balancing customer value, technical risk, delivery speed, and maintainability
- Clear collaborative communication and ability to use data and customer outcomes to guide decisions
- Django or Flask experience
- Experience with cart, checkout, payments, order management, or other transaction-heavy customer workflows
- Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or comparable technologies
- Experience with experimentation platforms, product analytics, feature flags, and measurable customer outcomes
What the Team is Saying
Zoro Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Retirement Support — Employer 401(k) contributions are advertised at 6% whether or not employees contribute, with some materials detailing a 3.5% automatic plus a 3.5% performance-based structure and immediate vesting. This setup is described as unusually generous for a mid-size e-commerce employer.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage begin on day one, with additional programs such as mental health/EAP also highlighted. These elements make core healthcare support both immediate and robust.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave and adoption assistance are featured alongside supporting protections like disability and supplemental life insurance. Public materials consistently highlight these family-focused offerings.
Zoro Insights
What We Do
Our e-commerce website has everything businesses and consumers need to make their business go, at prices that make sense. We have over 12 million products on our website (and counting) to help your business run that are shipped fast and often free. Throw in our award-winning workplace culture and you’ll find Zoro an amazing place to work and grow.
Why Work With Us
We've worked hard to foster a unique company culture built on transparency, collaboration, and innovation. We've also won a number of awards for our company culture along the way. Of course, it's not the awards that matter—it's the people. We pride ourselves on building a culture that allows our team members to bring their authentic selves to work!
Gallery
Zoro Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
At Zoro, we believe in balance—so we’ve made hybrid work a win-win! Team members are asked to work on-site in our office 2 days a week.
