Head of Applied Science

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

At Zalando, our vision is to be the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce - one that is inclusive by design. We only assess candidates based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We welcome applications from people of all gender identities, sexual orientations, personal expressions, racial identities, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and disability statuses. We only want to know why you’re great for this role, so please avoid including your picture, age, and marital status in your CV as well.

We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Please feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support and assist you throughout the hiring process.

do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy:https://jobs.zalando.com/en/our-culture/diversity-and-inclusion
 

THE ROLE AND THE TEAM

The Ranking Team’s mission is to deliver ranking capabilities that allow for optimising and tailoring the experience for each individual customer across the customer journey. We strive to develop an intelligent, adaptive, and personalized ranking system that maximizes engagement, relevance, and business impact by seamlessly connecting customers with the most desired fashion choices in real time.

By building a scalable and reusable set of ranking capabilities, we ensure that we provide the best experience for our customers on the experiences that the team is responsible for, Search and Catalog, but also that other teams can quickly access those capabilities to build truly personalised experiences all across Zalando. 

As a Head of Applied Science, you will build and lead teams of applied machine learning scientists to develop and deploy scalable personalization algorithms. You will provide a clear vision and strategy for Applied Science in our department as well as bring in the mindset working backwards from customer experience to leverage machine learning. Your contributions are expected to help shape Zalando's overall Applied Science community  consisting of more than 150 scientific experts. You will be the leading expert that product teams turn to for leadership on scientific topics and technical expertise. 

WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

• Develop and execute mid- & long-term vision and architectural direction to create highly scalable solutions in the domains of personalization and econometrics.

• Uncover areas of investments to increase personalization, diversity and economic impact. 

• Lead research and solution development to challenging problems, such as improving the prediction of customer actions and real-time recommender systems, long-term lift estimation and unified auction design.

• Attract, onboard, develop and retain diverse scientific talent to your team and transform the landscape of Zalando’s Personalisation team. Also, drive and build healthy inclusive teams promoting diversity.

• Build products in collaboration with Product Managers, Software Engineers, Designers and Applied Scientists.
   

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF

• A solid background (MSc, PhD or comparative experience) in a quantitative scientific discipline with a strong understanding of statistics,  machine learning, and econometrics applied in a commercial context of end-to-end development lifecycle of data-driven products.

• Significant experience leading and developing cross-functional engineering and science teams. You have effective communication skills in English, with an ability to understand and translate business and user requirements across teams.

• Experience with highly distributed, scalable and resilient software development with an understanding of an overlap between software engineering and applied science.

• Experience with online learning, click-through-rate prediction, whole-page recommendation, contextual bandits, long-term lift estimation, causality or reinforcement learning is a plus.

• Focus on people, maintaining trustful relationships with your teams, leading them and setting a high standard as an example.
   

PERKS AT WORK

• Culture of trust, empowerment and constructive feedback,open source commitment, meetups, game nights, 70+ internal technical and fun guilds, knowledge sharing through tech talks, internal tech academy andblogs, product demos, parties & events

• Competitive salary, employee share shop, 40% Zalando shopping discount, discounts from external partners, centrally located offices, public transport discounts, municipality services, great IT equipment, flexible working times, additional holidays and volunteering time off, free beverages and fruits, diverse sports and health offerings

• Extensive onboarding, mentoring and personal development opportunities and an international team of experts

• Relocation assistance for internationals

We celebrate diversity and are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.

OUR OFFER

Zalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.

• Employee shares program

• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners

• 2 paid volunteering days a year

• Hybrid working model with up to 60% remote per week, actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration

• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year

• 27 days of vacation a year to start for full-time employees

• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)

• Family services, including counseling and support

• Health and wellbeing options (including Wellhub, formerly Gympass)

• Mental health support and coaching available

• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review