Principal Applied Scientist

Zalando is hiring a Principal Applied Scientist in Berlin to act as technical authority and strategic leader for the Bidding and Allocation engines of Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS), its ad tech platform. The platform makes real-time ad decisions at tens of thousands of requests per second, and the role leads research and development of bidding and allocation algorithms spanning reinforcement learning, multi-objective optimisation, value-based bidding, incrementality-driven allocation and large-scale Bayesian inference. You advance auction and mechanism design, translate business constraints into mathematical objective functions with product managers, engineers and analysts, own the long-term scientific roadmap for bidding optimisation and coach other scientists. Candidates need a PhD in machine learning with publications, at least 5 years of optimising complex systems in ad tech or marketplaces, deep expertise in optimisation, control theory or reinforcement learning, experience productionising low-latency ML models and strong Python skills.