Principal Applied Scientist

**THE ROLE & THE TEAM**:
As one of our Principal Applied Scientists (AI and Machine Learning), you drive our scientific roadmap to create the next generation of risk management and fraud detection systems and devise new AI-based solutions along the whole value chain of Zalando Payments. You work closely with 10-20 applied scientists across several cross-functional teams and drive research & development initiatives. You raise the bar for scientific work and documentation and co-organize the applied science guild. As part of the leadership team, you work on eye-level with our Team Leads, Principal Engineers and Principal Product Managers. You act as direct contact for internal and external stakeholders, incl. upper management and translate their requirements into actionable R&D initiatives.

**INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN**

**WHY YOU SHOULD BE INTERESTED**
- Translate customer problems into scientific project plans and solution designs using state of the art technology and methods.
- Bring in your hands-on experience in developing and deploying machine learning algorithms, in particular Deep Learning, Bayesian solutions, or Causal modelling.
- When developing a model, you can exploit from the simplest tricks to the latest research papers to improve accuracy, and can implement it in an elegant, stable and scalable way.
- Actively engage in our cutting-edge research activity in collaboration with the Zalando Research Lab, other applied science teams, and academia.
- Act as an ambassador for Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence inside and outside the company. Mentor and train other Applied Scientists.

**WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF**
- Masters Degree or PhD. in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics or similar quantitative fields.
- 5+ years of industry experience with a strong command of Python, Machine Learning related libraries such as PyTorch, pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and big data frameworks such as Spark.
- Industry experience within Payments, Fraud detection, Retail industry is desirable.
- Profound understanding of statistics and machine learning from simple linear models to neural networks (e.g., LSTM, Transformers), including solid theoretical/mathematical foundations and a good experience about what works in practice.
- Excellent scientific writing skills, as demonstrated in a publication record in relevant Machine Learning conferences/journals

**ZALANDO BENEFITS**

**Career Development**
- We offer peer-to-peer performance reviews twice a year
- Learn and develop through our extensive Zalando training platform
- Join regular all-hands, team meetings, Q&A-sessions, and quarterly anonymous employee surveys to ask your questions and provide your feedback
- Support from an international team of experts; mentoring and professional development opportunities

**Wellbeing**
- 2 days paid leave per year for volunteering
- Minimum of 27 holiday days per calendar year
- Online sports courses, wellbeing, and nutrition advice offered by Humanoo personal wellbeing coach app
- Mental wellbeing support by our Employee Assistance Program and professional consultants to help you find health resources

**Flexibility**
- Flexible working hours
- Relocation assistance for internationals
- If you work from an office in your role, a choice of office equipment to be delivered to you, to support you working from home due to COVID-19 safety

**Financial**
- Access to the employee shares program
- 40% shopping discount on products shipped and sold by Zalando, and 30% discount on Zalando Lounge
- Discounts from a wide range of external partners

**Family**
- Employee parents' forums and employee resource group
- Supported transition into and out of parental leave, with a buddy and re-onboarding plan
- 3 fully-paid child sick days per year
- Free counselling, assistance, and referral service for all matters concerning yourself and your family via the Fürstenberg Institute

**ABOUT ZALANDO**

It's the perfect time to join Zalando on our journey, from being a pioneer in the world of e-commerce, to the starting point for fashion in Europe. We connect customers, brands, and partners across 23 markets.

Help us drive digital and sustainable solutions for fashion, logistics, advertising and research, bringing head-to-toe fashion to more than 46 million active customers through a team of diverse skill-sets, cultural backgrounds, and interests.

**About Zalando Payments**

Positioned at the bustling intersection of eCommerce and FinTech, Zalando Payments helps ensure that Zalando's customers can securely pay how they want when they want.

Zalando Payments builds the technologies for all financial transactions in the Zalando fashion store and our other consumer-facing apps. We work to deliver a flawless user experience in the checkout, as well as the processing of payments and reconciliation in the backend.