Principal Applied Scientist

 THE ROLE & THE TEAM

As a Principal Applied Scientist (economics / experimentations) in the Size and Fit organization, you will design and implement state of the art methods capable of accurately measuring the business and customer impact of AI-driven customer-facing Size & Fit products in fashion.  You will apply economic theories and principles to real-world business problems and have an amazing opportunity to work closely with exceptional scientists who are creating bold AI driven customer-facing products, with today's most exciting approaches in Deep learning / Computer Vision / LLMs, tackling impactful size & fit customer problems for 50+ million of Zalando customers. In addition to deep scientific expertise, a strong track record in research and publications, candidates for this role must possess exceptional collaboration and communication skills. You must be a reliable partner, adept at supporting complex AI-driven products that create high customer and business impact. Your ability to effectively interface with cross-functional teams and contribute to solving complex business impact measurement challenges in AI applications will be crucial in driving success.

ABOUT SIZE & FIT

At Zalando we deeply understand that Size and Fit Matters, and are excited to use our unique and huge article and customer datasets to tackle this challenge using novel deep learning and computer vision techniques. How about you; would you like to bring in your skills to shape a great experience for your family and friends when buying clothes and shoes online? 

You will join our multidisciplinary Size and Fit Org., composed of applied scientists, engineers, and full stack developers from +20 different nationalities. We provide recommendations and predictions on customer size and fit choices, and create focused AI driven products using emerging technologies to solve the challenges.

Working side by side with other Product Specialists, Fitting Experts, Engineers, and Applied Scientists, you will take on this complex and important topic. Our mission is to assist customers as they navigate the vast Zalando fashion catalog using fit characteristics that make sense to them and finding what fits them every time. We have great problems to solve, a huge customer base to impact and are a team that loves to have fun. Size and Fit is a human topic. We use machines to help solve our customers’ challenges. But we never forget - size and fit success is defined by how customers feel when they wear fashion.

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

At Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit. We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any

accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process.

do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy:

https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy

Our employee resource groups:

https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups

WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

• Bring in your strong economics, experimentations, and scientific experience to develop and deploy advanced experimentation methods at scale

• Support high stakes experiments and problem solving focused on customer/business impact and ensure decisions are made from robust insights. Set and own the processes to improve the quality of experimentation across Zalando experimentation domains

• Design and implement state-of-the-art work needed for accurately measuring the business impact of AI-driven customer-facing products across various markets, customer segments, and fashion assortment. 

• Work closely with applied science leaders, product managers and other business stakeholders to leverage state-of-the-art experimentations and data driven economics / experimentation approaches for the challenging domain of Size&Fit in online fashion.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• PhD in Econometrics, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Operations Research or related field with at least 4 years of industry experience in applied Experimentation or Statistics.

• Expertise in 2 or more of the following areas:

  • Business / Customer impact analysis and decision making in AI-driven customer-facing products 

  • Advanced experiment designs: network experiments, bandit-based experimentation, interleaving, switchback experiments

  • Applied high dimensional statistics, variance reduction techniques

  • Long term, heterogeneous treatment effect estimation

  • Bayesian approaches to A/B testing

• Experience building and leading Causal Inference products; from the problem analysis and data selection to their production deployment.

• Deep understanding of the theory behind the state-of-the-art methods in your domain as well as a broad overview of data science best practices in your field

• Data intuition: extensive experience of working with large online datasets, ability to identify appropriate statistical modeling assumptions and approaches.

• Coding skills in Python and/or R as well as experience with common big data processing and manipulation tools such as Spark and SQL

• Nice to have: experience with Cloud Computing frameworks (e.g., AWS), other programming languages such as Scala

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

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

Zalando SE

Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle, 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 35+ million active customers through diverse skill-sets, interests and languages our teams choose to use.

Please note that all the applications must be completed using the online form - we do not accept applications via email