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

Role: We 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 high‑impact leadership role bridges 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, operating high‑throughput services in a B2C environment and focusing on safe, observable, cost‑efficient AI features. Responsibilities: - 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. Qualifications: - Proven Engineering Leadership: significant experience as an Engineering Manager or Technical Lead with direct people‑management responsibilities and a track record of building, developing, and retaining high‑performing engineering teams. - Strong backend foundation: experience building and operating distributed systems at scale (microservices, cloud‑native architectures, CI/CD, reliability patterns, message queues/streams). - Comfortable with JVM and modern stacks: familiarity with JVM‑based backends (Java/Kotlin/Scala) and/or Python, and ability to reason about APIs, data stores, and infrastructure. - AI product engineering mindset: ability to translate AI possibilities into shippable software and understand the difference between demos and production systems. - Familiar (not expert) with ML/LLM fundamentals: understanding of embeddings, vector search, RAG, evaluation/metrics, prompt and workflow design, latency/cost trade‑offs, and experimentation. - Value observability: use of metrics/logs/tracing, defining SLOs, and building diagnosable, supportable systems. - Systems thinker and collaborator: capable of holding context across teams and codebases, aligning stakeholders, and making pragmatic trade‑offs. What We Offer: - Employee shares program. - 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, plus discounts from external partners. - 2 paid volunteering days per year. - Hybrid working model with up to 60% remote per week. - Ability to work from abroad for up to 30 days a year. - 27 days of vacation per year to start. - Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement). - Family services, including counseling and support. - Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass). - Mental health support and coaching. - Development through a training platform and biannual peer‑to‑peer review.