Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Platform | Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Platform (all genders)

Job Summary

This Senior Software Engineer role is crucial for scaling Zalando’s core Machine Learning Platform, which serves as the foundational intelligence layer for AI-native experiences like search, recommendations, and GenAI use cases. The successful candidate will design, build, and scale critical ML infrastructure services, focusing on distributed systems, streaming pipelines, and the central Feature Store. Day-to-day tasks involve owning the implementation of scalable, real-time feature and embedding systems, ensuring platform reliability by maintaining SLOs for data quality and freshness, and embedding security and governance by design (IAM, data protection). This position requires strong technical leadership, mentoring junior colleagues, driving automation (IaC, GitOps, CI/CD), and contributing strategic input to long-term platform decisions, making it ideal for an experienced engineer ready to elevate large-scale ML infrastructure.