Engineering Manager - Assortment - Partner Tech (all genders)

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Join Zalando’s Assortment & Steering domain! We build the data-driven systems that decide:

• Pre-season composition: which styles make it onto the digital shelves.

• In-season replenishment: when to restock and in what quantities.

• Performance analytics: insights that keep best-sellers flying and clear slow-movers fast.

• End-of-season measures: smart markdown and exit strategies that protect margin.

Our systems turn billions of signals into concrete actions for hundreds of internal assortment owners and 3.7K external partners and 20K users, ensuring every choice is both customer-relevant and commercially optimal. Day-to-day you’ll collaborate with Product, Data Science and Business peers, owning services end-to-end, from cloud micro-services and event-driven workflows to ML-powered decision engines, while shipping to production multiple times a day.

If you thrive on large-scale optimization problems, enjoy mentoring engineers, and want to see your work shape Europe’s leading fashion marketplace, you’ll feel right at home here.

At Zalando, our vision is to be the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce - one that is inclusive by design. We only assess candidates based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We welcome applications from people of all gender identities, sexual orientations, personal expressions, racial identities, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and disability statuses. We only want to know why you’re great for this role, so please avoid including your picture, age, and marital status in your CV as well.

We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Please feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support and assist you throughout the hiring process.

do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/our-culture/diversity-and-inclusion

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

• Lead and Develop a High-Performing Engineering Team: Build, mentor, coach, and empower a diverse team of cross-discipline software engineers. Foster an inclusive, collaborative engineering culture that values technical excellence, continuous learning, ownership, and innovation. Encourage a startup mindset within the team. Drive team performance, support individual career growth and champion healthy team dynamics.

• Delivery and Execution: Accountable for team’s outcomes including quality, reliability and timely delivery of technical work. Own the whole development cycle - from architecture design to implementation and testing, as well as maintenance. You co-own with your team the product roadmap and the business impact your team creates. For this, you have to understand Zalando’s business, work with product managers to develop technical vision for your team.

• Technical Leadership: Guide your team and help them solve their technical challenges, such as choice of the tech stack, system architecture, code quality, and system performance. You have a clear mid- and long-term technical vision for your products and foster close collaboration with other Lead Engineers to be in line with our overall tech strategy.

• Champion Operational Excellence: Take full ownership of the operational health and performance of the owned systems. Establish and monitor SLOs, drive improvements in system reliability and efficiency, and lead incident management and resolution. Proactively identify and implement optimizations for cost and performance.

• Proven Engineering Leadership: Significant experience as an Engineering Manager or a Technical Lead with direct people management responsibilities. A track record of building, developing, and retaining high-performing, healthy engineering teams that include senior/principal engineers.

• Hands-on Technical Leadership: 8 + years in modern software development, with 3 + leading engineering teams. You still enjoy diving into code / design reviews when it matters.

• Solid grasp of data modeling, batch + stream processing (e.g., Spark/Flink, Kafka), and cloud warehouses (Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift).

• Comfortable translating ambiguous business goals into measurable outcomes, MVPs, and iterative road-maps. You use metrics and user feedback to steer the team.

• Experience hiring, mentoring, and retaining Backend, Frontend, Data engineers in one team; you foster psychological safety and a high-bar for code quality, reliability, and UX.

• Deep knowledge of event-driven micro-services, REST/gRPC APIs, and CI/CD on one or more major clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure). Able to balance “build vs. buy,” tech debt, and scalability trade-offs

• Effective communication skills in English, ability to understand and translate business and user requirements across teams and senior leadership

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.

• Employee shares program

• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners

• 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

• 27 days of vacation a year to start for full-time employees

• 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