Principal Software Engineer

As a Principal Data Engineer in ZMS, your role involves guiding the direction and architecting and modelling the data intensive systems and services, serving high volume data to Partners, engineering teams and internal users.

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer with hands‑on experience in building data pipelines and systems, focusing on efficiency, reusability and performance optimisation. We are looking for an experienced data leader to cooperate closely with data and software engineers, product managers and data analysts under the ZMS organisation, closely collaborating with Data teams across Zalando. ZMS is the technology organisation within Zalando responsible for sourcing fashion products and consumer goods into Zalando.

Through our platform and tools, we provide a wide range of products to customers all over Europe. The organisation is composed of more than 300 talented individuals who are dedicated to creating the best platform and inspiring opportunities for multi million euro fashion brands and physical retail stores, connecting them with consumers across multiple European markets.

As a Principal Data Engineer within ZMS, you will get the opportunity to lead a new approach for building data products and the underlying data platform from the early stages together with your team. You will work in a welcoming and inclusive organisation of data engineers, software engineers and business analysts. You will communicate frequently with your team’s multiple and various stakeholders to understand and react to their needs in order to raise the data capabilities of all of ZMS.

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale data intensive systems and services to be served to multiple stakeholders in various ways.
• Ensure the implementation of a state-of-the-art software development methodology and cultivate best practices in software development.
• Operate a complex and advanced system landscape that meets the highest standards in terms of reliability, performance, and latency.
• Developing new approaches to data storage, evaluation, ongoing maintenance, and best practices that will be useful across the entire company, including with structured and unstructured data.
• Mentor junior to senior engineers and actively collaborate with other teams.
• Share knowledge and expertise within our talented engineering and science community.
• Work closely with data and software engineering leaders, product managers, designers, Partners, third‑party providers and other business stakeholders to bring our state-of-the‑art solutions to the customers and to discover and identify new opportunities.
• As part of our Principal Engineering Community, you collaborate with other senior individual contributors to set engineering standards, guide decision‑making for the technology landscape at Zalando via our Tech Radar.

• 10+ years of in depth experience in developing applications consisting of multiple modules managed by multiple teams.
• Expertise developing data models and data pipelines for batch and stream processing using AWS services, Databricks, Airflow, and similar technologies.
• Databricks experience and solid programming skills are a must.
• Expertise in the design and development of resilient, scalable distributed systems in cloud infrastructure, with a preference for proficiency in Kubernetes and AWS.
• Excellent software engineering skills to design and implement effective solutions for data strategies in large-scale production environments (data engineering, data version control).
• You excel at and are enthusiastic about both delivering projects hands‑on and leading development efforts.
• Strong communication skills and experience leading…