THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) is revolutionizing e-commerce marketing by helping partners build love brands, create strong customer relationships, and accelerate their business through data-infused, inspirational marketing strategies. Within ZMS, the Ad Marketplace domain is on a mission to put the right ad in front of the right customer at the right time, delivering value to partners while building trust through efficient monetization strategies.

As a Software Engineer in the Ad Platform team, you'll be at the heart of our advertising technology ecosystem, building and maintaining the critical infrastructure that powers our ad marketplace. You'll work on high-performance systems that handle thousands of requests per second, process massive volumes of user interaction events in near real-time, and manage hundreds of terabytes of data. Your expertise will be instrumental in developing advanced experimentation capabilities in our two-sided marketplace, directly impacting the success of our partners' campaigns and ZMS's financial performance. This role offers a unique opportunity to solve complex technical challenges at scale while contributing to a platform that connects ~50 million active customers across 25 European markets with fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands.

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

If you think you have what it takes, we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every single requirement. You may just be the right candidate for this or other roles!

At Zalando, our vision is to be the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce – one that thrives on diversity and is truly inclusive by design. We believe that diverse teams fuel innovation and creativity, and we actively seek out talent from all backgrounds.

We actively seek to reduce bias in our hiring and employment processes, focusing on your qualifications, skills, and contributions. To support this, we kindly ask that you refrain from including personal details such as your photo, age, or marital status in your CV, ensuring a fair and equitable evaluation based solely on your abilities and potential.

We are committed to providing an exceptional and accessible candidate experience for everyone. If you require any accommodations to support you throughout the hiring process, please let us know – we are here to assist you.

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

• Develop High-Performance Systems: Implement scalable, resilient services that power our ad marketplace platform, handling up to 4k RPS with strict latency requirements (p99 of 25ms 😉)
• Deliver Features: Decompose epics into manageable tasks, owning the execution from requirement refinement through to deployment and production operations
• Maintain Engineering Excellence: Elevate our codebase through readable, testable, and maintainable code, writing automated tests and defining clear acceptance criteria
• Collaborate and Share Knowledge: Actively participate in team discussions, help skill-up your peers, and partner with Product Managers, Analysts, and ML Ops to fill requirement gaps
• Operate What You Build: Deliver the supporting operational elements (metrics, alerting, graphs, tracing) to monitor performance and assist in root-cause analysis during production incidents

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF

• You're Inspired by Quality: You're passionate about clean code, readability, comprehensive testing, and building a culture of engineering excellence
• You're a Collaborative Builder: You enjoy sharing knowledge, helping your team grow, and constructively contributing to established team processes
• You're Tech-Savvy: You have deep experience with Java, Spring, and distributed systems, with knowledge of our tech stack (or eagerness to learn)
• You Deconstruct Complexity: Faced with a set of requirements, you can methodically break them down into small, safe deployment iterations while navigating technical constraints
• You're Product-Aware: You collaborate with product teams to understand user needs, call out conflicting requirements, and understand the core business KPIs your system impacts

Our Tech Stack:

• Kubernetes, AWS (EC2, S3, Kinesis, Firehose, ElastiCache, MWAA)

• Java (17+), Spring Framework
• Kafka (via Nakadi wrapper)
• PostgreSQL
• Airflow, Databricks, Spark

OUR OFFER

Zalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect.

• 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (and +1/year until 30)
• 2 paid volunteering days a year
• Hybrid working model with up to 60% remote per week, actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration
• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year
• Employee shares program
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners
• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)
• Family services, including counseling and support
• Health and wellbeing options (including Wellhub, formerly Gympass)
• Mental health support and coaching available
• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review