Senior Applied Scientist

The Discovery team assists customers in their fashion discovery journey and helps them find what they are looking for. We are developing the next generation of our discovery systems, utilising state-of-the-art information retrieval (IR) methods, particularly transformer-based deep neural networks and  large language models (LLMs).

As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will address challenging fashion problems using cutting-edge approaches. You will contribute to drive our scientific roadmap, applying your scientific capabilities and in collaboration with a team of exceptional scientists and engineers developing models and cutting-edge machine learning products that enhance the experience of over 51 million customers. 

 WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

• Utilize your extensive scientific experience in researching, deploying, and architecting machine learning and deep learning solutions in IR to enhance the inspiration journey of millions of our customers. 

• Contribute to develop scientific roadmaps to address complex fashion challenges using state-of-the-art solutions, ensuring we stay at the forefront of IR innovation. Contribute to our scientific endeavours through external publications in top-tier journals and conferences.

• Act as a mentor to junior scientists, foster collaboration with other teams, and actively share knowledge and expertise within Zalando’s science community. 

• Forge close partnerships with applied science leaders and  product managers, and other business stakeholders to deliver state-of-the-art machine learning solutions to our customers and uncover new opportunities for growth.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• PhD in IR, search & recommendation, information & knowledge management, or related fields (or equivalent experience), accompanied by 3+ years of industry experience in modern IR systems, especially neural IR. Comprehensive understanding of the key components of an IR system, including query processing, indexing, evaluation, etc. 

• Experience in applying scientific methods to tackle research problems. A strong inclination to collaborate with product, science, and engineering managers and solve business problems through scientific solutions.

• Track record of addressing real-world problems using machine learning throughout the entire product cycle, encompassing problem analysis, data processing, literature review, production deployment, monitoring, and maintenance. 

• Strong publication records at top-tier venues such as SIGIR, KDD, WWW, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, JMLR, etc.

• Hands-on experience in deep learning with proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow. Familiarity with LLMs. Proficiency in full-text search engines such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Apache Lucene is also desired.

• Knowledge of classical IR models is a plus (boolean, vector, and probabilistic).

PERKS AT WORK

• 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.

• Flexible hours

• Work load of 80-100%

• Competitive salary, employee share shop, 40% Zalando shopping discount, discounts from external partners, centrally located offices, public transport discounts, municipality services, great IT equipment, 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, PME family service and parent & child rooms* (*available in selected locations)

We celebrate diversity and are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need. 

ABOUT ZALANDO

Zalando is Europe’s leading online platform for fashion, connecting customers, brands and partners across 17 markets. We drive digital solutions for fashion, logistics, advertising and research, bringing head-to-toe fashion to more than 23 million active customers through diverse skill-sets, interests and languages our teams choose to use.