Senior Applied Scientist

About the Role and Team

The Marketing Science division at Zalando drives business growth by partnering across the entire marketing funnel. This team enhances the customer experience beyond the platform by linking consumers with fashion inspiration and seamless shopping, while prioritizing privacy through use of advanced technologies.

Collaboration is key with product managers, engineers, and analysts to continually improve our leading marketing engine.

Key Focus Areas

• Conducting rigorous experimentation to define the definitive framework measuring marketing impact.
• Creating advanced models such as attribution models to assign value to marketing touchpoints and propensity models to enhance targeting.
• Developing uplift models and audience segments to increase marketing effectiveness and identify incremental customer value.
• Optimizing marketing investments by managing external advertising channels and aligning spending with strategic goals.

In this position, you will team up with Senior and Principal Applied Scientists to guide advertising investment decisions by applying elasticity modeling, predictive forecasting, and mathematical optimization techniques to multi-objective constrained problems under uncertainty.

Main Responsibilities

• Manage the full machine learning lifecycle within your designated projects, from initial research stages through production scalability and ongoing monitoring, to advance our marketing steering capabilities.
• Work closely with engineering to transform innovative modeling prototypes into reliable, fully deployed production solutions.
• Promote a strong technical culture by leading cross-team knowledge exchange and setting standards for machine learning and operational practices.
• Serve as a strategic technical advisor to product and commercial teams, articulating complex algorithmic ideas into actionable business insights and solving critical problems at multiple organization levels.

Qualifications

• Strong academic background, preferably with a PhD, in Econometrics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or Optimization, coupled with industry experience, especially in marketing science.
• Demonstrable experience applying optimization methods relevant to portfolio, marketing, or pricing optimization.
• Expertise in Python, SQL, and PySpark with a focus on producing clean, well-documented code and collaborating effectively via code reviews to enhance engineering quality.
• Proactive and able to design and implement data science frameworks independently within ambiguous or complex environments.
• Experience mentoring junior to mid-level data scientists and contributing to the development of the team’s technical direction.

Benefits and Culture

• Starting with 27 annual vacation days, increasing up to 30 based on tenure.
• Discounts on Zalando fashion/beauty products and selected partner offers.
• Support for families including counseling and dedicated resources for parents and caregivers.
• Company pension scheme and employee stock programs.
• Access to health, wellbeing, mental health support, and professional coaching.
• Ongoing professional development opportunities through training platforms and peer review.
• Two paid volunteering days each year and relocation aid when applicable.
• An inclusive work culture that values diversity and equal opportunity, welcoming applicants of all backgrounds and identities.
• Option to work remotely abroad for up to 30 working days annually.

Inclusion and Equal Opportunity

Zalando is committed to an inclusive hiring process, eliminating discrimination across all identities and encouraging applicants to omit personal details unrelated to qualifications. Accommodations in the hiring process are available upon request to ensure equal opportunity.