Senior Applied Scientist (All genders)

Summary: The Senior Applied Scientist leads end-to-end machine learning ownership for Zalando's marketing science team, focusing on experimentation, advanced modeling, and audience optimization. The role involves collaborating with engineering and product teams to deploy sophisticated models, optimize marketing spend, and...

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

The Marketing Science team acts as the engine behind Zalando’s growth, partnering with business units across the full marketing funnel. We extend the Zalando experience beyond our platform, connecting customers with the fashion inspiration and shopping convenience they love. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we ensure our marketing is relevant, engaging, and deeply respectful of customer privacy.

We collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and analysts to refine our industry-leading marketing engine.

WHAT THE TEAM DOES

• Rigorous Experimentation: Establishing the "ground truth" framework for measuring marketing effectiveness.
• Advanced Modeling: Building attribution models to value touchpoints and propensity models to refine targeting.
• Audience Optimization: creating customer uplift models to identify incremental value and building audiences that improve marketing efficiency.
• Marketing Investment Optimization: Steering external advertising platforms and optimizing marketing spend to align with core business objectives.

In this particular role, you will collaborate closely with Senior and Principal Applied Scientists within Zalando to ensure that we are making the right investment decisions when it comes to advertising channels. To do so, you will leverage elasticity modeling, forecasting, and mathematical optimization to solve for multi-objective optimization under constraints and uncertainty.

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

• End-to-End ML Ownership: Own the entire machine learning lifecycle within your project scope - from initial research and formulation to scaling and monitoring - directly driving the evolution of our marketing steering engine.
• Bridge Research & Production: Partner closely with our engineering teams to transition sophisticated modeling POCs into robust, highly-tested, and fully deployed production systems.
• Elevate the Technical Culture: Foster and initiate cross-team knowledge sharing, establishing best practices in ML and MLOps to elevate both the technical depth and breadth of our broader data science community.
• Collaborate as a Trusted Partner: Act as a strategic technical partner for product and commercial stakeholders, translating complex algorithmic concepts into clear business strategies and solving high-impact problems across all organizational levels.

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF YOU HAVE…

• A strong academic foundation (PhD preferred) in Econometrics, Statistics, Machine Learning, Optimization, paired with practical industry experience, preferable within marketing science.
• Proven experiences in applying optimization techniques in the context of Portfolio optimization, Marketing optimization or Pricing.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and PySpark, with a commitment to high coding and packaging standards, including active participation in code reviews and elevating the team's engineering culture.
• A self-starter with a proven track record of architecting Data science frameworks in high-ambiguity environments.
• Demonstrated experience guiding, upskilling, and mentoring mid-to-junior data scientists and driving the team's technical roadmap.

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.

• 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (+1 day for every calendar year up to 30 days)
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners
• Family support, including counselling and dedicated services for parents and carers
• Company pension scheme
• Employee shares programme
• Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub
• Mental health support and coaching
• Development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review
• 2 paid volunteering days a year
• Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement)
• Learn all about Zalando and our values here:[https://jobs.zalando.com/en/?gh\_src=22377bdd1us](https://jobs.zalando.com/en/?gh_src=22377bdd1us)

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

At Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit. ​

• We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process.
• do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy:https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy

Our employee resource groups:https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups

• Opportunity to work from abroad for 30 (working) days per calendar year