Principal AI Scientist (all genders)

ABOUT THE ROLE

Zalando’s Zalando Assistant team is looking for a Principal AI Scientist to help us build the future of retail through conversational AI experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and intelligent agents. Your expertise will be key in designing and developing AI-driven systems that support fashion discovery, trend exploration, outfit recommendations, and conversational shopping experiences.

As a Principal AI Scientist, you’ll 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.

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN

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. 

do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy 

Our employee resource groups: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups 

WHAT WE’D 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 WE’RE 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

OUR OFFER

Zalando provides a range of benefits, here’s 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: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/?gh_src=22377bdd1us