Senior Applied Scientist - Search (all genders)

Role The Search team at Zalando is at the heart of our customer experience, responsible for the core discovery journey of millions of customers, ensuring they find the fashion and lifestyle products they love out of a catalog of millions of items. By leveraging state-of-the-art information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and emerging agentic AI, the team continuously improves query understanding, product ranking, and personalized search experiences. As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Search team, you will be a technical leader in developing and deploying advanced machine learning models and agentic workflows that directly impact the search engine's relevance and performance. Together with peers—engineers, product managers, and other scientists—you will tackle complex challenges at scale, drive scientific excellence, and set the standard for how we solve complex ranking and retrieval problems. Responsibilities - Research, design, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning models for search relevance, learning-to-rank (LTR), query understanding, and personalization, leveraging both traditional ML and autonomous, agentic LLM workflows. - Work with various stakeholders (Product, Engineering, Design) to understand the business context, translate customer problems into scientific formulations, and contribute to developing scalable solutions. - Support the end-to-end implementation of solutions, from offline model training on massive datasets to online deployment, and measure success through rigorous A/B testing and customer feedback. - Drive scientific and engineering excellence within the team, mentoring mid-level and junior scientists and championing novel approaches using agentic AI systems. Qualifications - Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, backed by solid, related industry experience in applied machine learning. - A strong track record of publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., SIGIR, KDD, ACL, NeurIPS) is highly preferred. - Deep expertise in Information Retrieval, Search Ranking, NLP, and hands-on experience designing and building agentic AI systems (e.g., autonomous agents, LLM-based reasoning frameworks). - Comfortable working with large-scale data systems and modern search engines. - Consistently demonstrate a customer-centric approach, possess a strong product mindset, and proactively flag continuous improvement initiatives within your area. - Take an active interest in market trends and the latest advancements in AI and Search technologies. What We Offer Zalando provides a range of benefits, including: 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).