THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Join Zalando’s Assortment & Steering domain! We build the data-driven systems that decide:

• Pre-season composition: which styles make it onto the digital shelves.
• In-season replenishment: when to restock and in what quantities.
• Performance analytics: insights that keep best-sellers flying and clear slow-movers fast.
• End-of-season measures: smart markdown and exit strategies that protect margin.

Our systems turn billions of signals into concrete actions for hundreds of internal assortment owners and 3.7K external partners and 20K users, ensuring every choice is both customer-relevant and commercially optimal. Day-to-day you’ll collaborate with Product, Data Science and Business peers, owning services end-to-end, from cloud micro-services and event-driven workflows to ML-powered decision engines, while shipping to production multiple times a day.
If you thrive on large-scale optimization problems, enjoy mentoring engineers, and want to see your work shape Europe’s leading fashion marketplace, you’ll feel right at home here.

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

• Lead and Develop a High-Performing Engineering Team: Build, mentor, coach, and empower a diverse team of cross-discipline software engineers. Foster an inclusive, collaborative engineering culture that values technical excellence, continuous learning, ownership, and innovation. Encourage a startup mindset within the team. Drive team performance, support individual career growth and champion healthy team dynamics.
• Delivery and Execution: Accountable for team’s outcomes including quality, reliability and timely delivery of technical work. Own the whole development cycle - from architecture design to implementation and testing, as well as maintenance. You co-own with your team the product roadmap and the business impact your team creates. For this, you have to understand Zalando’s business, work with product managers to develop technical vision for your team.
• Technical Leadership: Guide your team and help them solve their technical challenges, such as choice of the tech stack, system architecture, code quality, and system performance. You have a clear mid- and long-term technical vision for your products and foster close collaboration with other Lead Engineers to be in line with our overall tech strategy.
• Champion Operational Excellence: Take full ownership of the operational health and performance of the owned systems. Establish and monitor SLOs, drive improvements in system reliability and efficiency, and lead incident management and resolution. Proactively identify and implement optimizations for cost and performance.