We are from more than 50 different nations, representing a seemingly endless number of interests, hobbies, programming-language preferences, personalities and so much more. What unites us is the energy and enthusiasm we share in tackling our common purpose: to deliver award-winning, best-in-class shopping experiences to our 20 million active customers. Above all, it requires passion: to experiment, learn, fail, and repeat the process, so that we get stronger and better every day.
#findyourplay
Over the years, we have built a strong community. We love to share our passions, insights and expertise for technologies and topics we love through 100+ self-organized guilds, internal tech talks, training initiatives, demos, local meetup events, conferences and more. In addition to encouraging an engaged community, we support you in building your reputation as a tech leader - not only among your peers at Zalando, but industry-wide. We know that every new technology and methodology we implement involves a learning curve, so our team are dedicated to helping everyone get up to speed on using the tools they need to work successfully. And if you might wonder how we implement “autonomy, mastery and purpose” in practice and give them meaning, here are some examples:
We follow processes and practices that enable our technologists to work as efficiently, creatively and meaningfully as possible.
We are constantly helping our team stretch and grow in new directions by creating a working environment that is hands-on, inspiring and collaborative.
We want every Zalando to know and understand his or her rights and responsibilities, as well as the rights and responsibilities of their leader and the technology team at large.
We believe by working in small, agile, multi-disciplinary, autonomous teams, and living Radical Agility - a methodology built on trust and backed by an architecture that lets us move fast while keeping complexity low - teams can leverage their creativity and solve hard problems in original ways.
Every Zalando technologist needs to know the why behind what they do. Answering the why is how we achieve purpose. We have created a framework to help you find your purpose with us, to be your best, and to achieve great things.
Zalando promotes autonomy for both individuals and teams. As individuals, we pick our teams, create our own personal and professional development paths (we call them "tours of mastery"), and give each person a voice. At the team level, we self-organize. It’s how we foster trust and respect.
Our passion ultimately focuses on investing in our people. We strive to give you the best support we can: to help you grow, to provide a place where you can achieve mastery and greatness, and where you are inspired every day to do what you do best - both for Zalando and for yourself.
At Zalando we’re passionate about collaboration and giving back to the community. Check out our open source projects to learn more about the technologies we are contributing to and building.
"I moved to Berlin to start the Studio - a collaboration between Zalando SE and IDEO, after living in Munich and San Francisco for a couple years. It’s been amazing to work on such a variety of topics, connect with so many different teams at Zalando, uncover new business opportunities, imagine novel experiences, help define the product vision and bring it now to market - together with an incredible group of talented designers, product and engineering teams. That's why I decided to stay and grow the product design capability at Zalando. I don’t know many companies like Zalando, that are aiming to reimagine an entire industry."
Anne Pascual
VP Product Design
"My love for human languages inspired me to pursue a career as a data scientist. In a sense, all of humankind's knowledge is stored in written language in books, the Web, and elsewhere. Our hope is that data science - and in particular natural language processing (NLP) - can help computers and us make sense of all this textual data. Currently we are researching a technique called "annotation projection" that can automatically transfer NLP methods that work for one language (such as English) to another (such as German). This helps us immediately scale our NLP across the many European languages relevant for us and our customers."
Alan Akbik
Research Scientist
"In my team we are working on a machine learning product which is integrated into Zalando’s microservice ecosystem, meaning that a software engineer needs to be able to write #scalable restful web-services, create and tune data pipelines, write Spark jobs, perform all kinds of operational activities as well as have a notion about feature engineering. I prefer a holistic approach to the product and try to embrace all the spectrum of activities, no matter if they lie in software engineering, data science or research domain. I equally enjoy solo-, pair- and mob-programming and value quality over speed."
Elena Kovalenko
Software Engineer
"After a couple of months as an external consultant I was offered to join the Business Intelligence team. I thought it would be quite a difficult decision to leave the constant travelling life and move to Berlin – although I’ve never given up on travelling :). Turns out, it was fairly easy thank to the people I met here: very intelligent, competent, open-minded and of course very friendly. I think that the diversity of people from different countries and having different backgrounds is the reason why Zalando is full of innovative, great ideas and what makes people really enjoy working here."
Wojciech Michon
Inhouse Consultant MicroStrategy
