Senior Software Engineer (all genders)

Role - Senior Software Engineer (ML Platform) in Zalando's ML Platform team, responsible for designing, building, and scaling core ML infrastructure services that power AI-native experiences. Responsibilities - Own design and implementation of scalable real-time feature platforms, online serving infrastructure, and distributed ML runtime systems. - Deliver and maintain SLOs for feature freshness, data quality, online/offline consistency, and runtime reliability; implement monitoring, observability, and safe deployment practices. - Drive automation and self‑service (IaC, GitOps, CI/CD), reusable deployment templates, and operational tooling. - Contribute to reusable platform integrations and deployment automation for ML systems. - Implement identity and access management, secrets management, network isolation, and data governance. - Act as key technical contributor for complex ML infrastructure challenges; mentor junior colleagues; raise engineering bar through reviews and knowledge sharing. - Participate in technical design decisions, long‑term platform strategy, and collaboration with product and senior engineering leadership. - Support hiring, onboarding, and mentoring of engineers. Qualifications - 5+ years experience building and operating ML infrastructure or large‑scale distributed systems on cloud platforms (AWS/EKS or equivalent). - Strong skills in containerization (Docker), Kubernetes, and streaming/batch processing (Kafka/Kinesis, Spark/Flink). - Hands‑on experience with data/feature engineering pipelines, schema evolution, and online/offline consistency; familiarity with feature stores (Feast, SageMaker). - Experience designing and operating low‑latency, high‑scale distributed systems, including caching, request shaping, traffic management. - Experience operationalizing Kubernetes‑native ML workloads (model serving, deployment, runtime) using technologies such as NVIDIA Triton, MLflow, Kubeflow, ZenML. - Background in building or integrating developer tooling, platform automation, or workflow systems. - Proven track record of building reliable systems with SLOs, monitoring, and deployment safeguards; incident response and capacity planning. - Proficiency in security and governance (IAM, secrets management, network boundaries) and embedding compliance into workflows. - Strong collaboration and communication skills. What We Offer - 27 days of holiday (increasing up to 30 days), plus 2 paid volunteering days. - Employee shares program. - 40% discount on Zalando fashion and beauty products, 30% discount on Lounge by Zalando, and external partner discounts. - Relocation assistance (subject to agreement). - Family services, counseling, health and wellbeing options (including Wellhub/Gympass), mental health support and coaching. - Development opportunities through training platform and biannual peer‑to‑peer review.