Senior Applied Scientist

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

The Gift Cards team at Zalando is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to explore and validate new growth opportunities. Our team manages a broad and multi-channel business spanning online sales, physical retail partnerships, and corporate benefits. Because of the multi-channel nature of the business, our team interacts with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders. The questions addressed will include, (1) which product areas present the highest growth potential?, (2) what are the optimal strategies and policies to drive this growth?, and (3) how can we rigorously test and measure the value of our strategy?

As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Gift Cards team, you will drive the exploration and validation of growth opportunities in the team. To be successful, you will need to rely on a wide range of scientific, organizational, and personal skills. The two primary areas of scientific expertise we will use are experimentation and observational causal inference, so a strong background in statistics and causal analysis is essential. Interest and experience with mapping business needs to scientific research and finding solutions in ambiguous problem spaces is also expected, as well as working pragmatically with colleagues from a wide variety of backgrounds to find feasible workable solutions that will yield reliable and actionable insights.

This role will be attractive to candidates seeking to make an impact on a collection of critical business problems for Zalando and advance their career while doing so. The problem space here is ambiguous, so the ideal candidate will be intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, and experienced with a range of applied science methods. Core skills in statistics and experimentation are essential, and expertise with advanced statistical tools in both experimental and observational causal inference are required. Familiarity with the retail e-commerce and/or fashion sectors and excellent communication skills are both a plus and experience addressing business problems related to gift cards, vouchers, or pricing is a strong plus.

WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

• Bringing a range of applied science expertise to help drive the research agenda in an exciting new domain.

• Supporting robust evidence-based decision-making by conducting high-quality scientific research and translating the insights from that research into policies,

• Making such insights accessible and actionable for our stakeholders and customers,

• Educating a diverse range of stakeholders, at all levels, on how to use the right tool for the right use case, and

• Leading and owning processes that help the company keep a high bar in terms of data-driven decision-making.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• A PhD in Economics, Statistics, or related field (biostatistics, causal machine learning, quantitative marketing, computational social sciences)

• At least 2 years of industry experience in data science with a focus on experimentation and causal inference.

• Expertise in the areas below:

  • Experimentation, including geotesting, encouragement designs, variance reduction methods, heterogeneous treatment effects estimation, surrogate models

  • Observational causal inference, including panel data methods, causal inference under unconfoundedness, doubly robust methods

  • Machine learning fundamentals

• Experience building and leading applied science products: from the problem definition to data selection and model development to deployment in production

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

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.

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