• Lead, manage, inspire and grow multiple teams. As a leader of leads and principal engineers, it will be your responsibility to coach your directs to become the best they can be. You will provide direction, guidance and amazing working conditions for cross-functional delivery that involve multiple engineering teams, serving a broad range of use cases. You will be accountable for the delivery of the long-term architectural roadmap and the reliable operation of the department's production software systems.
• Engage with stakeholders and other leaders across the company and sites to deliver an outstanding product to satisfy the needs of our internal and external customers and stakeholders, especially our Brand and Retailer partners and system integrators.
• Ensure that development of the systems is simplified and scales to the future needs and volumes of Zalando. Stay at the forefront of technology, including cloud-native platforms, AI, Machine Learning, developer tooling, and modern software engineering practices. Leverage existing platform capabilities, APIs, software services, and emerging technologies to build scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient systems capable of supporting Zalando's continued growth and innovation.
• Drive the adoption of AI-native engineering practices and intelligent platform capabilities. Champion the responsible use of Machine Learning, Generative AI, and agentic systems where they create measurable value for partners, developers, and the business. Lead the evolution of our engineering organisation to leverage AI both as a product capability and as an accelerator for software delivery, operational excellence, and developer productivity.
• Help shape Zalando's engineering culture by attracting, developing, and inspiring exceptional engineering talent while fostering engineering practices that create remarkable impact for our customers and partners at scale. Encourage a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and AI-assisted engineering excellence.

WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF...

• You are an empathetic and egoless but passionate leader who excels at developing, coaching, and mentoring engineering leaders and engineers.
• You have 7+ years of professional experience as a people lead in an international, cross-functional environment, as well as a proven track record building and scaling engineering teams within a mid or large scale organisation (over 30+ engineers) co-operating effectively over geographical sites.
• You have a strong understanding of modern technology landscapes, supported by a solid technical background and multiple years of hands-on software engineering experience with technologies such as Scala, Kotlin, Java, TypeScript, or Python. You are familiar with distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, APIs, and modern software engineering practices.
• You have experience working with systems in AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Experience leading teams building AI- and ML-powered products and platforms is a significant advantage. Practical experience with agentic programming, Large Language Models (LLMs), production Machine Learning models, AI-enabled software architectures, and bringing intelligent systems into production is considered a strong bonus.
• You have an extraordinary knowledge of fashion e-commerce systems. integration of those with the partners and serving their business transactions, e.g., for price, stock, order and logistics management.
• Your drive and positive energy is contagious and you have a track record of helping and motivating teams to do their best and most effective work of their careers.
• You possess an understanding of software delivery KPIs (release velocity, lead time, etc.) and how to influence them to create a high performing technology organisation with high predictability.
• You have the ability to share and nurture technical ideas and direction across the organisation and a proven ability to influence decision making at all levels and in a variety of contexts.
• You have experience working with different functions, experts, and levels of leadership.

OUR OFFER

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

• Culture of trust, empowerment and constructive feedback, open source commitment, meetups, game nights, 70+ internal technical and fun guilds, knowledge sharing through tech talks, internal tech academy and blogs, product demos, parties & events
• Competitive salary, employee share shop, 40% Zalando shopping discount, discounts from external partners, centrally located offices, public transport discounts, municipality services, flexible working times, additional holidays and volunteering time off, free beverages and fruits, diverse sports and health offerings
• Extensive onboarding, mentoring and personal development opportunities and an international team of experts
• Relocation assistance for internationals