Senior Applied Scientist - Search (all genders)

Location: Berlin

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

The Search team at Zalando is at the heart of our customer experience. We are responsible for the core discovery journey of millions of customers, ensuring they find the fashion and lifestyle products they love out of a catalog of millions of items. By leveraging state-of-the-art information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and emerging agentic AI, we continuously improve query understanding, product ranking, and personalized search experiences.

As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Search team, you will be a technical leader in developing and deploying advanced, machine learning models and agentic workflows that directly impact our search engine's relevance and performance. Together with your peers—engineers, product managers, and other scientists—you will tackle complex challenges at scale, drive scientific excellence, and set the standard for how we solve complex ranking and retrieval problems.

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

You’ll research, design, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning models for search relevance, learning-to-rank (LTR), query understanding, and personalization, leveraging both traditional ML and autonomous, agentic LLM workflows.

You’ll work with various stakeholders (Product, Engineering, Design) to understand the business context, translate customer problems into scientific formulations, and contribute to developing scalable solutions.

You’ll support the end-to-end implementation of your solutions, from offline model training on massive datasets to online deployment, and measure success through rigorous A/B testing and customer feedback.

You’ll drive scientific and engineering excellence within the team, mentoring mid-level and junior scientists and championing novel approaches using agentic AI systems.

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF

• You hold a Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, backed by solid, related industry experience in applied machine learning.
• A strong track record of publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., SIGIR, KDD, ACL, NeurIPS) is highly preferred.
• You have deep expertise in Information Retrieval, Search Ranking, NLP, and hands-on experience designing and building agentic AI systems (e.g., autonomous agents, LLM-based reasoning frameworks).
• You are comfortable working with large-scale data systems and modern search engines.
• You consistently demonstrate a customer-centric approach, possess a strong product mindset, and proactively flag continuous improvement initiatives within your area.
• You take an active interest in market trends and the latest advancements in AI and Search technologies.

OUR OFFER

• Zalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.
• 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (+1 day for every calendar year up to 30 days)
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners
• Family support, including counselling and dedicated services for parents and carers

Company pension scheme

• Employee shares programme
• Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub
• Mental health support and coaching
• Development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review
• 2 paid volunteering days a year
• Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement)

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 European technology platform for fashion and lifestyle – 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.

Discover more about our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/our-culture/diversity-and-inclusion