Principal Applied Scientist

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will drive the scientific vision and execution for the Bidding and Allocation engines within Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS). Every time a customer interacts with Zalando, our ad tech system must make high-stakes decisions in real-time. The system evaluates thousands of candidate ads, predicts performance metrics, and executes sophisticated auction logic to decide which ad to show and at what price. Every second, we process tens of thousands of requests where the intersection of market dynamics and machine learning creates unique challenges. In this position, you will lead our optimization efforts at the frontier of high-load low-latency Engineering, Auction Theory, and Mechanism Design. The technical scope covers Large Scale Bayesian Inference, Value based Bidding, Incrementality-based Allocation, Reinforcement Learning, and Multi-Objective Optimization. You will be instrumental in evolving our auction mechanisms to balance advertiser ROI with a premium customer experience.