Engineering Manager - AI Innovation // Lounge by Zalando (all genders)

THE ROLE & THE TEAMWe are opening a new Engineering Manager role in AI Innovation to reflect our growing scope and transition from experimentation to scalable, production-grade AI capabilities. This is a high-impact leadership role where you will bridge modern AI (LLM-powered experiences, automation, and decision support) with reliable backend engineering and measurable business value.You will lead a team building AI-enabled products and platform capabilities used across consumer and internal journeys. We operate high-throughput services in a B2C environment and focus on shipping AI features that are safe, observable, and cost-efficient.INCLUSIVE BY DESIGNAt Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit. We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process. do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: Our employee resource groups: WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)Define the blueprint: Shape strategy and execution principles for turning AI opportunities into scalable capabilities (from prototypes to platform and product features).Deliver measurable impact: Drive end-to-end delivery of AI-enabled experiences with clear outcomes (conversion, CSAT, productivity, cost) and trustworthy measurement.Engineer the product logic: Build the decisioning and orchestration that determines what the user sees and why (assistant flows, automation steps, ranking/selection, fallbacks).Integrate assistant frameworks: Bring assistants into real systems by integrating orchestration, tool/function calling, retrieval (RAG), and knowledge sources with strong security boundaries.Build for scale and reliability: Own high-load, real-time APIs and event-driven services (queues/streams, caching, rate limiting, resilience patterns).Operational excellence: Take accountability for SLOs, 24/7 readiness, incident response, and on-call maturity for critical services.Responsible AI by design: Implement guardrails for privacy, safety, and compliance; establish evaluation and quality gates (offline tests + online A/B experimentation).Grow people and culture: Hire, coach, and develop engineers; foster a culture of ownership, feedback, and engineering excellence.WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF YOU HAVE...Proven Engineering Leadership: Significant experience as an Engineering Manager or a Technical Lead with direct people management responsibilities. A track record of building, developing, and retaining high-performing, healthy engineering teams.Strong backend foundation: You have built and operated distributed systems at scale (microservices, cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, reliability patterns, message queues/streams).Comfortable with JVM and modern stacks: You are familiar with JVM-based backends (e.g., Java/Kotlin/Scala) and/or Python, and you can reason about APIs, data stores, and infrastructure.AI product engineering mindset: You can translate AI possibilities into shippable software and you understand the difference between demos and production systems.Familiar (not expert) in ML/LLM fundamentals: You do not need advanced ML expertise, but you understand concepts like embeddings, vector search, RAG, evaluation/metrics, prompt and workflow design, latency/cost tradeoffs, and experimentation.You value observability: You use metrics/logs/tracing, define SLOs, and build systems that are diagnosable and supportable.You are a systems thinker and collaborator: You can hold context across teams and codebases, align stakeholders, and make pragmatic tradeoffs.OUR OFFERZalando 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.Employee shares program40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, discounts from external partners2 paid volunteering days a yearHybrid working model with up to 60% remote per weekWork from abroad for up to 30 working days a year27 days of vacation a year to startRelocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)Family services, including counseling and supportHealth and wellbeing options (including Gympass)Mental health support and coaching availableDrive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer reviewLearn all about Zalando and our values here: RecruiterBenan [email protected] note that all applications from this job page must be completed using the online form - we do not accept applications via e-mail. Once reviewed, our recruiters will contact applicants via an official Zalando email address (@zalando.de).In some cases we also work with a selection of headhunters and agencies to fill specific roles. Please note that neither Zalando nor our recruiting partners will ask for any kind of payment to apply for a job or attend an interview.If you have any questions about our recruitment process, please take a look at our .ApplySoftware EngineeringOur Software Engineering teams deploy software extensively, managing a broad set of applications and conducting thousands of deployments per week. The Software Engineering team enables Zalando as Europe’s number one multi-brand, digital platform for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle for our partners and customers. As a Zalando Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a community of thousands of colleagues across Europe. Software EngineeringAbout ZalandoIt’s the perfect time to join Zalando on our journey to build the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce. Help us offer an inspiring and quality multi-brand shopping experience for fashion and lifestyle products to about 50 million active customers in 25 markets. Or be part of our logistic infrastructure, software or service capabilities to help brands and retailers run and scale their entire e-commerce business, on or off Zalando. Join our Zalando ecosystem, to enable positive change for the fashion and lifestyle industry. Back to job descriptionTHE ROLE & THE TEAMWe are opening a new Engineering Manager role in AI Innovation to reflect our growing scope and transition from experimentation to scalable, production-grade AI capabilities. This is a high-impact leadership role where you will bridge modern AI (LLM-powered experiences, automation, and decision support) with reliable backend engineering and measurable business value.You will lead a team building AI-enabled products and platform capabilities used across consumer and internal journeys. We operate high-throughput services in a B2C environment and focus on shipping AI features that are safe, observable, and cost-efficient.INCLUSIVE BY DESIGNAt Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit. We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process. do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: Our employee resource groups: WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)Define the blueprint: Shape strategy and execution principles for turning AI opportunities into scalable capabilities (from prototypes to platform and product features).Deliver measurable impact: Drive end-to-end delivery of AI-enabled experiences with clear outcomes (conversion, CSAT, productivity, cost) and trustworthy measurement.Engineer the product logic: Build the decisioning and orchestration that determines what the user sees and why (assistant flows, automation steps, ranking/selection, fallbacks).Integrate assistant frameworks: Bring assistants into real systems by integrating orchestration, tool/function calling, retrieval (RAG), and knowledge sources with strong security boundaries.Build for scale and reliability: Own high-load, real-time APIs and event-driven services (queues/streams, caching, rate limiting, resilience patterns).Operational excellence: Take accountability for SLOs, 24/7 readiness, incident response, and on-call maturity for critical services.Responsible AI by design: Implement guardrails for privacy, safety, and compliance; establish evaluation and quality gates (offline tests + online A/B experimentation).Grow people and culture: Hire, coach, and develop engineers; foster a culture of ownership, feedback, and engineering excellence.WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF YOU HAVE...Proven Engineering Leadership: Significant experience as an Engineering Manager or a Technical Lead with direct people management responsibilities. A track record of building, developing, and retaining high-performing, healthy engineering teams.Strong backend foundation: You have built and operated distributed systems at scale (microservices, cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, reliability patterns, message queues/streams).Comfortable with JVM and modern stacks: You are familiar with JVM-based backends (e.g., Java/Kotlin/Scala) and/or Python, and you can reason about APIs, data stores, and infrastructure.AI product engineering mindset: You can translate AI possibilities into shippable software and you understand the difference between demos and production systems.Familiar (not expert) in ML/LLM fundamentals: You do not need advanced ML expertise, but you understand concepts like embeddings, vector search, RAG, evaluation/metrics, prompt and workflow design, latency/cost tradeoffs, and experimentation.You value observability: You use metrics/logs/tracing, define SLOs, and build systems that are diagnosable and supportable.You are a systems thinker and collaborator: You can hold context across teams and codebases, align stakeholders, and make pragmatic tradeoffs.OUR OFFERZalando 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.Employee shares program40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, discounts from external partners2 paid volunteering days a yearHybrid working model with up to 60% remote per weekWork from abroad for up to 30 working days a year27 days of vacation a year to startRelocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)Family services, including counseling and supportHealth and wellbeing options (including Gympass)Mental health support and coaching availableDrive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer reviewLearn all about Zalando and our values here: RecruiterBenan [email protected] note that all applications from this job page must be completed using the online form - we do not accept applications via e-mail. Once reviewed, our recruiters will contact applicants via an official Zalando email address (@zalando.de).In some cases we also work with a selection of headhunters and agencies to fill specific roles. Please note that neither Zalando nor our recruiting partners will ask for any kind of payment to apply for a job or attend an interview.If you have any questions about our recruitment process, please take a look at our .Apply