We talked with Victoria Osterloh, our Senior Applied Scientist, about her career, development, projects, and what she would advise our talent communities if they were to apply to Zalando.
Hi Victoria, can you shortly introduce yourself and your role to our Talent Community?
I’m Vicky and a Senior Applied Scientist in the Department Commercial Planning & Trading AI (CP&T AI) where I’m leading the NLP team.
What motivated you to start at Zalando in the first place?
Funnily, my twin sister Laura joined Zalando first, while I was in the course of finalizing my master’s program in Meteorology. She shared a job offer of the Marketing Data & Analytics A/B Testing Team with me and I applied on the same day. When I got the final call from Zalando, I felt extremely happy. I have been so excited to change the scene and apply my knowledge in physical science in the business world at a modern and growing company.
Tell us a bit more about your development.
In 2017, I started my career in the A/B Testing Team as a Junior Marketing Analyst and changed to Data Science one year later. Together with my team, we have been working on the development of the Geo A/B testing tool by constantly increasing the level of automation, improving the underlying methods and further extending the scope. By doing that, I could heavily deepen my technical and methodological skills.
After being promoted to an Applied Scientist in 2019 and in the context of a further growing team scope, I have been focusing more on Consumer A/B Testing and Engineering tools. Following a restructuring in 2021, our team got integrated into the CP&T AI Department and I had the chance to start working in a completely new field — Natural Language Processing (NLP). I moved up to a Senior Applied Scientist and left the Causal Inference Team to fully turn to NLP.
What are your current projects and how do they differ from your previous position?
Our team is developing products to automate processes and generate insights with the help of NLP techniques. The main project we are working on at the moment is a tool for automated contract matching for the Partner Program to accelerate the review process of the affected teams.
The biggest difference is the high level of responsibility and ownership by leading the NLP team and being a mentor for interns as well as Data Science enthusiasts from different teams across CP&T. It is exciting to collaborate with so many people of different levels and backgrounds and work towards the common goal of building valuable products with a significant business impact for Zalando.
What would you recommend for our talents when they apply for Zalando?
Before applying for a job, I would recommend asking yourself where you stand and what you aim to achieve. This self-reflection enables you to accomplish personal goals and aspirations without any detours.
Look for a role that helps you advance to the next stage of your career and provides ample learning and growth opportunities.
Don’t undervalue your years of experience, though. You should not shy away from applying for positions that don’t exactly match the requirements, because you feel “unqualified”. In the light of the fact that hardly everyone is 100% suited for any job, you are probably more skilled than you believe. Be confident, promote your skills and strive for your goals.
Who did support you in your progression? Did you have a mentor?
During my career journey at Zalando, various people have been helping me to grow both personally and professionally.
My leads have truly enriched and shaped me — they not only drove my technical development, but taught me various other capabilities as well, shared their advice, and steadily gave me new responsibilities.
All the colleagues and coworkers I have been collaborating with in the past years have definitely been another big factor in further deepening my technical skills.
Last but not least, I was very lucky to have been matched with 3 incredibly great mentors in the Zalando Mentorship Program who strongly supported me on my path from Junior to Applied Scientist. The weekly to bi-weekly mentoring sessions with Ludmilla (Strategic Development), Pierre (Applied Science) and Iulia (P&O) required some self-discipline but were huge fun and highly accelerated the development of my skills in Coding, Machine Learning, Statistics, Communication, Strategic Thinking and improved my business and organisational understanding as well. Looking back, the mentorship has proved valuable for my personal growth and I’m very grateful for this experience.
How do you see your next step within your role (any ambitions or contributions)?
I would like to follow my deep desire to further upskill my technical and non-technical abilities, since there is so much more I can learn. At the same time, I’m excited to bring others forward and help them in improving their skills in the field of Applied Science.
Thank you for reading. If you’re curious about Applied Science at Zalando, check out our open positions here.
