He worked for Truscon (the Trussed Concrete Steel Company Limited), and later formed his own practice and as William V. Zinn & Associates was the sole named consulting engineer on the construction of the Merrion Centre in Leeds.

[2] He later formed his own practice and as William V. Zinn & Associates was the sole named consulting engineer on the construction of the Merrion Centre, Leeds, in the early 1960s.

[3] Zinn travelled extensively in the Far East in the course of his work and became interested in Buddhist philosophy, publishing The Global Philosophy in 1971 which was reprinted by Vantage Press of New York in 1984 as a companion volume to his second book, Phenomena and Noumena, also published by Vantage that year with a foreword by Colin Blakemore, professor of physiology at the University of Oxford.

[4][5] In the books, Zinn argued that the thought of the Gautama Buddha, preserved in the Theravada and taught in Sri Lanka, forms a complete and scientific philosophy, parts of which can be compared to Immanuel Kant's phenomena and noumenon.

[6] In an afterword to Phenomena and Noumena, Gerald du Pré, chairman of the Scientific Buddhism Association, summarises Zinn's arguments in favour of a "global philosophy" that would unite science and morality by rejecting mysticism, faith, and spirituality, thus preventing people living in a state of perpetual hypocrisy and confusion created by the conflict between science and faith.