Senior Principal Software Engineer

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Within the Executive Principal Engineering team, we advance the long-term direction of the Zalando Group technology capabilities and assets, tackling the company’s most complex and cross-cutting technical initiatives and challenges. We provide deep and broad technical leadership on current hurdles and future opportunities, particularly those that span business units, require sustained direction, and demand a blend of strategic clarity and practical delivery.

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer, you will be operating across software systems, operations, data platforms, and emerging technology. You will shape core technology platforms, lead the early stages of cross-organizational technical efforts, and ensure engineering investments create durable capabilities centered on reuse, interoperability, and long-term scale. As part of our Principal Engineering Community, you confidently operate as a senior individual contributor, leading through influence and continuously raising the bar for engineering excellence across the Zalando Group.

This role carries company-wide visibility, influence, and stakes. True to our values, we commit to creating a high-challenge, high-support environment. We’re looking for someone who is energized by the opportunity to extend it further. You’ll join a small team of peers who share the complexity, challenge each other’s thinking, and have each other’s backs. We support you in your growth as much as we expect your contributions.

• Guide systems and cross-organizational technical direction. Shape the design of systems, especially where scale, reliability, performance, and adaptability matter. Resolve the most important cross-cutting technical problems for the business.
• Create shared platforms and technical leverage. Identify where common systems, tools, and capabilities should be built once and used many times. Lead the early shaping of these efforts so teams can build on solid foundations, move faster, and focus on differentiated customer and partner value.
• Advance AI as a company capability. Drive the company’s adoption of AI as an overall engineering capability, in partnership with scientific leadership. Set the technical foundations for applying AI across products, platforms, and technology development so teams can leverage it effectively, safely, and at scale.
• Deliver impact through hands‑on contributions for critical work embedded with teams tackling complex, high‑stakes problems. Provide design leadership, technical judgment, and hands‑on problem solving that accelerates execution and improves outcomes.
• Set the bar for engineering quality and operational excellence. Raise the technical bar of the engineering organization through mentorship, leadership, and direct work on the systems and programs that matter most. Strengthen systems thinking, execution quality, and Zalando’s ability to build and operate technology in production.
• Cultivate technical community and industry leadership. Guide the company’s technical communities, working closely with the Principal Engineering and Principal Applied Science communities. Spearhead and scale training and knowledge sharing formats. Strengthen the company’s engineering and technology direction and positioning internally and externally.
• Scan the technology horizon. Identify technology developments and industry shifts that matter to the Zalando Group and its long‑term technical direction. Evolve the Zalando Tech Radar, finding balance between standardization and local innovation, targeted assessments of specific technology areas, and scaled rollout of emerging and proven practices.

• You are comfortable leading versatile, complex, and high‑stakes projects simultaneously across different business domains. You have deep expertise in architecting resilient, mission‑critical distributed systems. System and data migrations are not alien to you.
• Customer focus drives your problem solving approach. Your deep understanding of engineering excellence required in building customer‑facing products at scale enables you to guide delivery, unblock projects through…