Engineering Manager - Content Team

Join us to help drive the development of the ZMS advertisement platform that strives to inspire, engage and inform Zalando shoppers through unparalleled brand‑curated and highly relevant advertising experiences, seamlessly supporting our customer’s shopping journey by empowering partners to promote their brand, stories and products. As the Engineering Manager of the Content team, you will lead six engineers responsible for the content that Zalando partners (brands, retailers, etc.)

show on Zalando, including organic and sponsored content. You will own both the look and feel of the different formats, such as Boards, Landing Pages and Ads, as well as the Content Workspace tooling that partners use to upload assets and compose these formats.

We only assess candidates based on qualifications, merit and business needs. We welcome applications from people of all gender identities, sexual orientations, personal expressions, racial identities, ethnicities, religious beliefs and disability statuses. We only want to know why you’re great for this role, so please avoid including your picture, age and marital status in your CV.

• Lead, coach and mentor a high‑performing team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, psychological safety and continuous learning through active coaching and feedback.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to shape and deliver the technical roadmap and define mid‑to‑long‑term technical goals, ensuring seamless collaboration across ZMS and Zalando and translating business requirements into scalable, high‑quality solutions.
• Demonstrate strong product ownership and product insight, deeply understanding the product, market and business context to inform technical strategy, constructively challenging priorities when needed and ensuring engineering efforts align with maximum business impact.
• Oversee the technical direction and drive technical excellence in our core systems while remaining technically sharp—ready to participate in architecture reviews or dive into the code to unblock complex challenges.
• Define and enforce engineering standards, from CI/CD pipelines to robust testing strategies (TDD/E2E), ensuring that quality is a core feature of every release and that secure, high‑performance services are delivered while managing infrastructure costs.
• Actively shape the team structure, identify talent gaps and drive the hiring process to attract top‑tier engineers who share our values and possess the right skills for evolving business needs.
• Establish and maintain effective team rituals and practices, identify and drive process improvements and create a culture of continuous learning through knowledge sharing and mentorship to grow team members’ skills and careers.

• Proven leadership experience in a fast‑paced environment, having created a culture of trust, growth and responsibility.
• Solid background in Full Stack Software Engineering, including frontend technologies (React) and backend technologies (Node.js, JVM ecosystem such as Kotlin/Java). Experience with mobile app development (iOS, Android) is a plus.
• Well‑versed in modern architecture patterns (Microservices, Event‑Driven, REST/OpenAPI) and experienced with AWS services and containerisation.
• Leader who can still "talk shop" with senior engineers, conduct meaningful architecture reviews and contribute to complex architectural decisions.
• Business acumen—ability to translate technical debt and infrastructure needs into clear business value for stakeholders, particularly for user‑facing interfaces.
• Understanding of regulations such as the European Accessibility Act and experience in introducing compliance to them.
• Fluent English communicator who can navigate technical complexity and…