Head of Applied Science & Engineering - Search

Director-level role owning search scientific strategy across Zalando's fashion platform: long-term vision for search relevance and discovery via ML/AI and experimentation. Leads ML model development for query understanding, retrieval, ranking, and personalization; builds and mentors a team of applied scientists and ML engineers; balances relevance, diversity, monetization, and operational efficiency; invests in ML platforms, data infra, and experimentation frameworks; drives cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, UX, leadership. Requires proven applied-science/ML org leadership, deep ML/IR/learning-to-rank/NLP expertise, strong experimentation/causal-inference background, large-scale production ML deployment experience, and senior stakeholder influence.