Senior Applied Scientist

The content and ad economics team is working on creating great customer experiences with advertising. We do this by building a fair and explainable visibility marketplace, optimizing long-term value for customers and brands. We are running millions of ad auctions per day and are building innovative, scalable and value-creating products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and have a bias for action. 

As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will work in a cross-functional team with applied scientists, software & research engineers and product experts. You will work on improving our algorithms that match customer preferences with the offerings of our brands and our platform. This entails understanding the short- and long-term impact of these matches on all marketplace participants and steering the actions of participants towards optimal value. Our research problems are involved, at the intersection of Microeconomics (Auctions), Econometrics, Causal inference, and high-load low-latency Machine Learning Engineering, giving opportunities for scientific contributions.

WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

• Work on estimating the long-term effects of ads and other content

• Perform econometric modeling, simulations and causal inference

• Work on designing and improving digital markets

• Design and implement new research agendas related to (paid) content selection

• Build MVP research products to validate ideas

• Implement validated MVPs in production, in collaboration with software engineers

• Contribute to the vibrant science community at Zalando

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Master or above (PhD) in quantitative economics, computer science or a related quantitative discipline with a strong foundation in econometrics, statistics, microeconomics and computational methods

• Track record of supporting to build, run and change systems powered by scientific insights, striking a balance between scientific rigor and pragmatism for impact 

• Experience applying the scientific method in industry settings, applying a structured research process to validate or invalidate hypotheses 

• Highly rigorous and at the same time strong drive for impact

• Deep care about good science, while being just as passionate about deriving actionable insights

• Experience promoting inclusive culture practices and processes that are models for others

​Nice to have: 

• Background in Empirical Industrial Organization and/or Algorithmic Game Theory 

• Education/Expertise in both Economics and Computer Science (for example: Bachelor in CS, Master in Econ)

• Previous experience in AdTech