Join Our Team: Principal Applied Scientist - IR (All Genders)

The Discovery team at Zalando is dedicated to assisting customers on their fashion discovery journey, helping them find exactly what they're looking for. We are currently developing the next generation of our discovery systems, leveraging cutting-edge information retrieval (IR) methods, including transformer-based deep neural networks and large language models (LLMs).

Your Role as a Principal Applied Scientist

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you'll play a pivotal role in tackling challenging fashion-related problems using innovative approaches. Your contributions will shape our scientific roadmap as you apply your expertise to deliver projects across departments in collaboration with multiple teams. Working closely with Zalando's science leaders, you'll guide a team of outstanding scientists and engineers to develop machine learning models and products that enhance the experience of over 51 million customers.

Where Your Expertise Is Needed

• Utilize your extensive experience in researching, deploying, and developing machine learning and deep learning solutions in IR to elevate the inspiration journey for millions of customers.
• Collaborate with multiple teams to create a cutting-edge scientific stack that aligns with our product strategy and drives architectural and design principles.
• Develop long-term scientific roadmaps to address complex fashion challenges using state-of-the-art solutions, ensuring we stay at the forefront of IR innovation.
• Contribute to our scientific endeavors through internal peer reviews and external publications in top-tier journals and conferences.
• Act as a mentor to junior and senior scientists, promoting collaboration with other teams, and actively sharing knowledge within Zalando's science community.
• Forge close partnerships with applied science leaders, product managers, and other stakeholders to deliver advanced machine learning solutions and discover new growth opportunities.

What We Are Looking For

We seek candidates with:

• A PhD in IR, search & recommendation, information & knowledge management, or related fields (or equivalent experience), and 6+ years of industry experience in modern IR systems, particularly neural IR.
• Comprehensive understanding of key IR system components, including query processing, indexing, and evaluation.
• Proven ability to develop long-term research roadmaps and apply scientific methods to solve research problems.
• A strong disposition towards collaboration with product, science, and engineering managers to solve business problems through scientific solutions.
• Extensive experience in addressing large-scale real-world problems using machine learning, covering the entire product cycle from problem analysis to deployment and maintenance.
• Strong publication records at top-tier venues such as SIGIR, KDD, WWW, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, JMLR, etc.
• Hands-on experience in deep learning with proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow. Familiarity with LLMs is a plus.
• Proficiency in full-text search engines such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Apache Lucene is desired.
• Knowledge of classical IR models (boolean, vector, and probabilistic) is advantageous.

Perks at Work

• Culture of trust, empowerment, and constructive feedback.
• Commitment to open-source, meetups, game nights, and over 70 internal technical and fun guilds.
• Knowledge sharing through tech talks, internal tech academy, blogs, product demos, parties, and events.
• Flexible working hours (80-100% work load).
• Competitive salary, employee share shop, 40% Zalando shopping discount, discounts from external partners, centrally located offices, transport discounts, municipality services, great IT equipment, extra holidays, and volunteering time off.
• Diverse sports and health offerings, free beverages and fruits.
• Extensive onboarding, mentoring, personal development opportunities, and an international team of experts.
• Relocation assistance for internationals, PME family services, and parent & child rooms (in selected locations).

Inclusive by Design

At Zalando, we strive to be inclusive by design. Our hiring process is built to ensure equality, and we do not discriminate based on gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or disability status. You are welcome to omit your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We evaluate candidates based solely on their qualifications and merit. If you