Senior Applied Scientist - Agentic AI (all genders)

Role: Senior Applied Scientist - Agentic AI Team: Customer Care Technology, Applied Science team (Berlin-based) Responsibilities: - Drive end-to-end research: Translate ambiguous, high-impact business challenges in Customer Care Technology into structured research plans, leading projects from discovery to production deployment. - Build agentic systems: Apply rigorous scientific methodologies to design, fine-tune, evaluate, and scale advanced LLM applications and agentic workflows. - Own production models: Take end-to-end accountability for AI models in production—including architecture design, performance optimization, deployment, and real-time monitoring at scale. - Elevate standards: Establish best practices for research methodologies, ensuring high-quality, reproducible experiments across the team. - Mentor & inspire: Coach junior Applied Scientists, fostering a culture of scientific rigor, innovation, and operational excellence. - Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with product managers, data engineers, and software engineers to seamlessly integrate AI solutions into production services. Qualifications: - AI productionization: Strong track record of autonomously tackling complex research projects and shipping scientific innovations into customer-facing AI products at scale. - Core LLM expertise: Extensive expertise in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on building and scaling production-grade LLM applications. - Agentic system design: Strong understanding of agentic architectures, agent orchestration, hallucination mitigation, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). - Engineering & tech stack: Excellent programming skills in Python (including frameworks like PyTorch and PydanticAI), strong SQL skills, and hands-on experience with Databricks. - Strategic communication: Ability to think strategically and effectively translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for non-experts and senior leadership. - Agile & collaborative mindset: Results-driven, collaborative mindset, comfortable navigating high-uncertainty environments, and actively taking initiative to uncover high-value research opportunities. 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) - 2 paid volunteering days a year - Employee shares programme - 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners - Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement) - Family services, including counselling and support - Health and wellbeing options (including Wellhub, formerly Gympass) - Mental health support and coaching available - Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review