Principal Data Scientist - Search and Recommendation (all genders)

Principal Data Scientist - Search and Recommendation

As a Principal Data Scientist in our Search & Recommendation department, you will play a central role in shaping how millions of customers discover fashion on Zalando. You'll educate with key insight the development of advanced machine learning models that drive relevance, ranking, and personalized recommendations across the platform. Your work will focus on solving complex challenges such as understanding customer intent, modeling user behavior in real time, and ensuring our algorithms surface the right items in the right context.

Collaborating closely with engineers and product managers, you’ll help define the scientific roadmap for the department, ensuring our technical direction aligns with business impact. You’ll guide experimentation strategies, introduce scalable analysis approaches, and influence the evolution of our systems. Acting as a hands-on expert, you’ll support your applied science and engineering colleagues, fostering a strong culture of research, innovation, and cross-functional impact.

WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

• Leadership: Experience leading and shaping the scientific roadmap of the teams in products that span across multiple areas and working with senior AS leaders. Ability to discover new business opportunities collaborating with product, science, and engineering managers and solve business problems through scientific solutions.

• Customer Journey Understanding: Utilise graph theory, sequence modelling and other state of the art data mining techniques to map out the customer journey across our e-commerce website, identifying key nodes, pathways, and customer behaviors.

• Advanced Statistical Modelling  and Visualization: Analyse large datasets and leverage state of the art statistical modelling to uncover insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. Create clear, compelling visualisations to communicate these findings.

• Predictive Modelling: Develop models to predict customer behaviours, preferences, and potential future pathways.

• Optimization Strategies: Provide recommendations for website design and navigation improvements based on customer journey analysis.

• Collaboration: Work closely with the UX/UI design team, marketing, and product management to implement changes based on your insights.

• Reporting: Regularly present findings and progress to stakeholders in a clear, accessible manner.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Educational Background: Master’s degree or Ph.D in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, economics or a related field OR equivalent experience.

• Experience: 5+ years experience in data science, with a focus on customer journey analysis, high dimensional statistics, graph data mining, or related areas.

• Technical Skills: Proficiency in Python and its data analysis libraries (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn). Experience with large-scale graph and sequence analysis tools is a plus (e.g. Neo4j). Other technical skills include SQL (BigQuery, Snowflake or RedShift), visualisation in Microstrategy or similar.

• Analytical Skills: Strong analytical skills with the ability to collect, organise, analyse, and disseminate significant amounts of information with attention to detail and accuracy.

• Communication Skills: Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex data into actionable insights for non-technical audiences.

• Continuous Learning: Stay updated with the latest trends and techniques in data science, graph theory, and customer behaviour analysis.

• Problem-Solving: Strong problem-solving skills with a creative approach to finding and implementing solutions.

PERKS AT WORK

• Culture of trust, empowerment and constructive feedback, open source commitment, meetups, game nights, 70+ internal technical and fun guilds, knowledge sharing through tech talks, internal tech academy and blogs, product demos, parties & events.

• Competitive salary, employee share shop, 40% Zalando shopping discount, discounts from external partners, centrally located offices, public transport discounts, municipality services, great IT equipment, flexible working times, additional holidays and volunteering time off, free beverages and fruits, diverse sports and health offerings.

• Extensive onboarding, mentoring and personal development opportunities and an international team of experts.

• Relocation assistance for internationals, PME family service and parent & child rooms* (*available in selected locations)

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. 

ABOUT ZALANDO

Zalando is Europe’s leading online platform for fashion, connecting customers, brands and partners across 23 markets. We drive digital solutions for fashion, logistics, advertising and research, bringing head-to-toe fashion to more than 52 million active customers through diverse skill-sets, interests and languages our teams choose to use.