THE ROLE & THE TEAM
Zalando is on a mission to become a pan-European fashion and lifestyle ecosystem. Partner Tech acts as a key gateway to Zalando’s brand ecosystem. We build the infrastructure, digital interfaces, foundational data services and AI-driven intelligence that enable thousands of brand partners—from global fashion powerhouses to local boutiques—to operate and thrive within our B2C marketplace. By solving complex challenges along the full partner journey - from partner onboarding, article lifecycle and order management to assortment planning and commercial steering - we are on a mission to transform Zalando into the preferred platform for fashion and lifestyle across Europe.
As Senior Principal Product Manager (Head-level IC), you will act as the horizontal steward of our end-2-end digital partner journey. You will bridge the gap between complex backend capabilities, data products and high-performing partner experiences, while architecting a next-generation AI platform that transforms static tools into intelligent, automated and agent supported workflows. If you’re ready to redefine how partners interact with and operate on the Zalando ecosystem, then we’d love to speak!
Find out more about our Software engineer team: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/what-we-do/software-engineering
WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)
- Horizontal Experience Stewardship: You will oversee the end-to-end digital partner journey. You look beyond individual team boundaries to identify friction points in the ecosystem, coordinating cross-functional efforts to drive a cohesive, high-performance experience for our brands.
- AI Platform Strategy & Orchestration: You will define the vision and strategy for our central AI Platform powering our digital partner ecosystem. This includes building internal infrastructure—such as LLM orchestration, agentic frameworks, and RAG patterns—that empowers our product teams to deploy intelligent automation for partners.
- Ecosystem-Led Infrastructure: You will be a key driver of our platform evolution, ensuring our infrastructure is modular, extensible, and ready to integrate deeply with relevant external systems of our partners via APIs and autonomous agents
- Central Infrastructure Ownership: You will directly oversee the roadmap for key central products, including our Partner Design System and the foundational technical infrastructure upon which partner-facing digital applications are built.
- Executive Communication & Influence: You act as a high-bandwidth bridge between Engineering and leadership. You translate complex technical trade-offs into compelling business narratives that align with our long-term ecosystem goals.
- Leadership & Mentorship: While primarily an individual contributor, you will play an active role in leveling up our product craft by coaching and mentoring more junior product colleagues in your product area and become a key member of our product craft leadership team in Partner Tech.
WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF
- Systemic Platform Thinking: You have 10+ years of experience in high-scale platforms, SaaS, or Marketplaces. You understand APIs-as-products, developer experience (DX), and the nuances of building distributed platform services.
- AI-Fluent Product Craft: You are technically firm in the Generative AI stack. You have a deep understanding of LLM orchestration, Agentic workflows, and how to move from AI experimentation to production-grade automation. While you uncover new product opportunities in these new technologies, you always work backwards from a deep understanding of your customer and the value it can bring to the business.
- Mastery of Influence: You are an expert at driving alignment across complex organizations. You know how to manage high-stakes change management and strategic programs without requiring direct line-management authority.
- Technical Authority: You can spar with Principal Engineers on architecture and system design, then pivot to a commercial leadership meeting to discuss partner performance and scalability.
- Customer & UX Excellence: You believe enterprise software should be as intuitive as B2C. You advocate for high-quality, consistent digital experiences as a strategic differentiator for our ecosystem.
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)
- 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
Recruiter
Orjada Bilo
Team description
Zalando Partner Tech is the technology organisation within Zalando responsible for sourcing fashion products and consumer goods into Zalando. Through our platform and tools, we provide a wide range of products to customers all over Europe. The organisation is composed of more than 300 talented individuals who are dedicated to creating the best platform and inspiring opportunities for multi million euro fashion brands and physical retail stores, connecting them with consumers across multiple European markets.
As a Data Engineer within Partner Tech, you will get the opportunity to shape the ways we build, extend and improve our data platform. You will work in a welcoming and inclusive team of data engineers. You will be responsible for the identification, collection and transformation of data, consumed by Zalando Partners and internal users. You will communicate frequently with your team’s stakeholders to understand and react to their needs in order to raise the data capabilities of all of Partner Tech.
We actively leverage Databricks and Airflow, together with Python and Spark on top of AWS infrastructure to build our pipelines and Anomalo for our data quality process.
What you'll do
- Be in the driver's seat. You enjoy being proactive, addressing intricate business problems and taking the initiative to independently explore and understand them.
- Share your ideas about ways to enhance existing tooling and processes.
- Support the implementation of a reliable and performant data infrastructure that integrates with internal and 3rd party tools.
- Collaborate with diverse teams of talented data analysts, applied scientists, business analysts, product managers, and software engineers to implement and maintain high-performance data-processing and data integration systems on top of lake house architecture.
- Work with senior data engineers, and peers in central data platform teams to develop the system architecture and ensure seamless integration into Zalando's central data platform
- Establish and enforce data quality standards throughout the ETL process.
- Set up mechanisms to proactively identify and address potential issues before they impact data integrity.
We'd love to meet you if
- You have solid programming skills in Python.
- Several years of proficiency in engineering best practices, designing, implementing scalable data pipelines from data lake.
- Experience of running data processing pipelines using distributed data processing frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with a cloud ecosystem (AWS, GCP or Azure) and integration with orchestration services (like Airflow).
- Experience in working with MPP data warehouse, e.g. Redshift, Big Query or Snowflake.
- You have excellent verbal and written communication skills in English with an ability to articulate complex technical topics and solutions concisely and simply.
- Nice to have: Experience with Databricks and Apache Spark. Previous operational excellence contributions and support rotation experience (24/7, incident management etc) would be a definite plus.
If you have what it takes, we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every requirement. You may be the right candidate for this or other roles!
Our offer
- Culture of trust, empowerment and constructive feedback with internal guilds and Employee Resource Groups, knowledge sharing through tech talks and open source commitment, internal tech academy and blogs, product demos, meetups, parties and events.
- Competitive salary and employee shares program.
- 40% Zalando discount of products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge and additional discounts from external partners
- Monthly transport, lunch and recreation vouchers, private health insurance and occupational health care services, family services, free beverages and snacks, diverse sports and health offerings
- Centrally located office in Kamppi, Helsinki, with flexible working times, additional holidays and hybrid working model
- Extensive onboarding, mentoring and training opportunities and an international team of experts to work with
- Relocation assistance for internationals
Tech stack
- Databricks
- Airflow
- Python
- Spark
- AWS
- Anomalo for data quality
