Principal AI Scientist (all genders)

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Principal AI Scientist youll play a significant role in shaping the architecture and capabilities of the Zalando Assistant. You will work on AI agents RAG pipelines prompt engineering and LLM integrations ensuring high-quality grounded and engaging conversations. Your domain will span the full customer lifecycle helping drive customer activation engagement retention and conversion through intelligent conversational experiences.

This is a hands-on role with direct impact on customer-facing experiences. You will build and improve production AI agents used by millions of customers working closely with product and engineering partners to deliver measurable business impact through improved product discovery recommendation relevance and purchase conversion.

You will be at the center of fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation ensuring assistant improvements are rigorously evaluated using both offline and online metrics. Your work will directly influence business impact improving engagement retention and long-term customer value through conversational AI.

At 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.

- our diversity & inclusion strategy: employee resource groups: WED LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

• Design and build conversational AI agents

• Develop and integrate RAG pipelines to enrich experiences with fresh contextual data

• Design tune and evaluate LLM prompts to improve response quality and user engagement

• Integrate LLMs with search recommendation and external APIs

• Define and implement evaluation frameworks for conversation quality and grounding

• Run experiments and optimize assistant performance for business KPIs (conversion engagement retention)

• Own the architecture development and deployment of LLM-powered agent workflows

• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering product and data science teams

• Mentor colleagues and share best practices in applied AI and agent development
  

WHAT WERE LOOKING FOR

• 10 years of experience in the field of engineering or applied science.

• Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade applications

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

• Experience optimizing AI systems for business KPIs

Any of the following is a strong plus:

• Experience building LLM-powered applications or AI agents

• Experience with prompt engineering tuning and evaluation

• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangChain LlamaIndex PydanticAI DSPy or similar

• Experience integrating LLMs with external APIs tools and/or RAG systems

• Experience evaluating conversation quality and defining LLM metrics is a plus

• Experience with vector databases embeddings or retrieval systems

Zalando provides a range of benefits heres an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.

• Employee shares program

• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando 30% off Zalando Lounge discounts from external partners

• 2 paid volunteering days a year

• Hybrid working model with 60% (or more) remote per week actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration

• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year

• 27 days of vacation a year to start

• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)

• Family services including counseling and support

• Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass)

• Mental health support and coaching available

• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review Learn all about Zalando and our values here: