Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Platform (all genders)

Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Platform

Our ML Platform team builds the foundational intelligence layer that powers Zalando’s AI-native experiences. We provide low-latency features, embeddings, and real-time updates that enable applied science and product teams to deliver search, recommendations, personalization, forecasting, and emerging GenAI use cases.

As a Senior Software Engineer (ML Platform), you will play a key role in designing, building, and scaling these core ML infrastructure services. You’ll work hands-on with distributed systems, streaming pipelines, and feature platforms, while also mentoring peers and contributing to engineering best practices across the team.

At Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. We do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status.

Responsibilities

• ML Subject Matter Expertise: Own the design and implementation of golden paths for building scalable, real-time features and embedding systems.
• Platform reliability: Deliver and maintain SLOs for feature freshness, data quality, and online/offline consistency.
• Embed security by design: Implement identity and access management, secrets management, network isolation, and data governance.
• Enable developer productivity: Drive automation and self-service (IaC, GitOps, CI/CD), Deliver documentation and onboarding assets.
• Provide technical guidance: Act as a go-to engineer for complex ML infrastructure challenges, mentor junior colleagues, and raise the engineering bar.
• Contribute to strategic decisions: Take ownership of technical design decisions within the team and bring informed input to long-term platform strategy discussions.
• Grow the team: Play an active role in hiring, onboarding, and mentoring engineers, helping to build a strong technical culture around ML infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong ML/Data platform experience: 4+ years of experience building and operating ML Infrastructure or large-scale data system on cloud platform.
• Feature platform or data transformation expertise: Hands-on experience with data/feature engineering pipelines schema evolution, and ensuring online/offline consistency.
• Distributed systems builder: Skilled in container (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and streaming/batch processing technologies.
• Model serving and low-latency systems: Practical experience with production serving stacks, request shaping, caching, and traffic management.
• Observability and reliability: Track record of building reliable systems with SLOs, monitoring, and deployment safeguards.
• Security and governance: Proficiency in IAM, secrets management, network boundaries, and data protection.
• Collaboration and communication: Able to work closely with engineers, applied scientists, and product partners.

Benefits

• Employee shares program
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando
• 2 paid volunteering days a year
• Hybrid working model with 60% remote per week
• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year
• 27 days of vacation a year to start
• Relocation assistance available
• Family services, including counselling and support
• Health and wellbeing options
• Mental health support and coaching available

Zalando is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all qualified candidates.

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