Senior Risk Mitigation Manager (all genders)

Role As the Senior Risk Mitigation Manager, you will lead a vital function within Customer Care Operations Excellence dedicated to managing operational risk, verifying complex customer claims, and handling critical escalations. In this C7 role, you will lead and develop a team of 4 Risk Mitigation Leads, guiding them as they oversee expert teams responsible for operational claim verification, ensuring accurate refund decisions, managing financial exposure, and executing GDPR compliance and public escalation protocols. Your focus is entirely on the operational execution and strategic management of these risks. You are a strategic anchor for the department, with a customer-centric mindset, actively influencing our direction to align with broader organizational goals. A core component of this role is operational workflow optimization and execution excellence: you will independently define problem statements regarding team efficiency, quality assurance, and case management, implementing tailored, data-driven solutions to optimize how your teams process manual workloads. You will act as the operational bridge to centralized teams (like Fraud Intelligence), providing structured frontline insights to support their overarching process adjustments. Your leadership will ensure that Zalando's brand image is protected and that high-quality, standardized decision-making operational frameworks are sustained. You will collaborate extensively with senior internal stakeholders—including Fraud Intelligence, Privacy Law, Legal, Compliance, and Corporate Communications—presenting well-structured strategic initiatives directly to internal senior management. Responsibilities - Disciplinary Leadership of Leaders: Directly manage, evaluate, and develop a team of 4 Risk Mitigation Leads. Foster inclusive leadership and high team engagement, providing development opportunities and coaching your directs to effectively lead their own high-stakes operational teams executing claim verifications and refund decisions. - Drive Operational Workflow Optimization: Independently define problem statements regarding internal team efficiency and case handling at the pillar level. Apply deep knowledge of Zalando's data landscape to automate internal workflows, standardize, and optimize how agents execute claim verifications and escalations. - Champion Strategic Risk Reduction & Delivery: Translate complex customer and business issues into clear operational project plans. Define and monitor KPI targets on a pillar level (e.g., general operational performance, claim verification accuracy, privacy compliance, reputational risk). Anticipate risks in global operational processes, assess them, and trigger required countermeasures. - Steer Critical Incidents & Executive Stakeholder Management: Supervise the operational handling of major incidents (e.g., severe operational fraud attempts, PR crises, complex refund escalations) while ensuring all key stakeholders (internal and external) are involved at an early stage. Establish long-lasting relationships at the pillar level and above, acting as the operational counterpart to Fraud Intelligence, and present work-in-progress and strategic solutions to internal senior management. - Process Sustainment & Standardization: Pay close attention to process details, ensuring excellent output through high documentation standards and best practices in operational decision-making. Stress-test your own solutions, proactively identify inefficiencies, and initiate cross-departmental measures to improve how customer claims and risks are operationally processed. - Community Contribution & Mentorship: Act as a role model by initiating knowledge transfer and best practice sharing across teams. Train and mentor colleagues across your department, actively shape internal events, and raise the bar by conducting interviews during the recruiting process. Qualifications - Leadership of Leaders: Solid experience managing managers in a customer care operations, risk management, escalations, or compliance-focused environment. Demonstrable success in building high-performing operational teams and fostering inclusive engagement. - Operational Risk & Process Excellence & Governance: Explicit and proven capability in customer-centricity, strategic thinking and overarching process excellence improvement within an operational setting. In-depth experience in eCommerce Customer Care, knowledge of industry standards for claim verification and refund management, and ability to identify and prioritize value-adding tasks that move the department toward its strategic goals. - Data-Driven Problem Solving: Strong analytical skills with the ability to apply logical, easy-to-understand frameworks to complex operational issues. Capable of using data and simple statistical models to provide evidence in root cause analyses and validate solutions with stakeholders early in the lifecycle. - Deep Understanding of Operational Compliance: Significant expertise in operationalizing data privacy (GDPR) requirements, executing fraud mitigation procedures, and managing reputational risk, coupled with the ability to anticipate global process risks and implement mitigations. - Exceptional Senior Stakeholder Management: Proven ability to effectively collaborate with, influence, and provide expert advice to senior stakeholders in Fraud Intelligence, Legal, Compliance, and Communications. You excel at translating complex operational process excellence matters into clear language for non-experts. - Crisis Management & Resilience: High adaptability with a strong ethical compass and a proven track record of maintaining composure and driving strategic change through critical customer incidents, complex claim escalations, or significant regulatory shifts. What We 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. - 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (+1 day for every calendar year up to 30 days) - 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners - Family support, including counselling and dedicated services for parents and carers - Company pension scheme - Employee shares programme - Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub - Mental health support and coaching - Development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review - 2 paid volunteering days a year - Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement)