Senior Data Engineer - Personal Relevance (all genders)

The Role & The Team

Lounge by Zalando is the fastest-growing segment of Zalando, boasting billions of euros in annual turnover. Despite this success, there remains significant untapped potential in personalization and recommendation.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will lead the effort to build a large-scale recommender system. As Europe's largest online fashion retailer, we require an exceptional engineer capable of creating Machine Learning pipelines in Spark on a global scale. Your responsibilities will encompass everything from batch/stream preprocessing, model training, and model/feature distribution to the real-time recommender system.

You will have full autonomy in making architectural decisions and implementing state-of-the-art ML recommender algorithms. Few roles offer such a unique combination of scale and ML complexity.

Inclusive by Design

At Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. This begins with our hiring process. We do not discriminate based on gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or disability status. Feel free to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We assess candidates solely on their qualifications and merit.

We aim to provide a great candidate experience. Please let us know if you need any accommodations, so we can support you throughout the hiring process.

Learn more about our diversity and inclusion strategy:

Explore our employee resource groups:

What You’ll Love Doing

• Provide critical data infrastructures like large-scale ETL processes, Data Warehouses, stream processing and batch processing pipelines, and high-throughput/low-latency data stores.
• Enhance our ML infrastructure, including training/evaluation frameworks and experimentation frameworks.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Engineers, and Analysts across Zalando to create a positive customer impact.
• Help define your team’s objectives and continually improve team self-organization.

We’d Love to Meet You If

• You are a Software Engineer specializing in data management with experience in designing systems and writing high-quality code – not just SQL.
• You have 3+ years of experience in large-scale data engineering projects.
• You possess solid experience with large-scale batch processing and/or stream processing (e.g., Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Storm, Apache Beam, Kafka).
• You have a good understanding of distributed data processing mechanisms and can diagnose and optimize slow-running data pipelines.
• You are proficient in either Python or Java.
• Experience with distributed databases, especially high-throughput/low-latency stores like DynamoDB, Cassandra, Aerospike, Redis, etc., is a strong plus.

Our Offer

Zalando provides a range of benefits to our employees. Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

• Employee shares program.
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, and discounts from external partners.
• Two paid volunteering days per year.
• A hybrid working model with 60% remote work per week (actual practice depends on each team).
• The option to work from abroad for up to 30 working days per year.
• 27 days of vacation per year to start.
• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement).
• Family services, including counseling and support.
• Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass).
• Mental health support and coaching.
• Opportunities for development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review.

Learn more about Zalando and our values here:

Please note that all applications must be submitted using the online form. We do not accept applications via email.

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