{"id":55338,"title":"Principal AI Scientist (all genders)","company":"Zalando","city":"Berlin","region":"Berlin","location":"Berlin, Berlin","work_model":"hybrid","employment_type":"unknown","employment":["full_time"],"visa":"not_mentioned","relocation":"offered","posted_at":"2026-11-03T18:09:14.414000+00:00","tools":["Python","LLM","LangChain","LlamaIndex","RAG"],"seniority":"lead","years_experience_min":10,"german_requirement":"not_mentioned","german_level":"unspecified","english_requirement":"not_mentioned","english_level":"unspecified","team_language":"unknown","confidence":0.4,"method":"rules+llm","language_badge":"Not stated","language_evidence":null,"requirements_snippet":"10+ years in engineering or applied science, strong Python and production-grade application experience, strong analytical skills, and experience optimizing AI systems for business KPIs. LLM agent, prompt engineering, and RAG …","url":"https://jobs.zalando.com/en/jobs/2725592-Principal-AI-Scientist-(all-genders)","source":"careersite","description_text":"ABOUT THE ROLE\n\nZalando’s Zalando Assistant team is looking for a Principal AI Scientist to help us build the future of retail through conversational AI experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and intelligent agents. Your expertise will be key in designing and developing AI-driven systems that support fashion discovery, trend exploration, outfit recommendations, and conversational shopping experiences.\n\nAs a Principal AI Scientist, you’ll play a significant role in shaping the architecture and capabilities of the Zalando Assistant. You will work on AI agents, RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, and LLM integrations, ensuring high-quality, grounded, and engaging conversations. Your domain will span the full customer lifecycle, helping drive customer activation, engagement, retention, and conversion through intelligent conversational experiences.\nThis is a hands-on role with direct impact on customer-facing experiences. You will build and improve production AI agents used by millions of customers, working closely with product and engineering partners to deliver measurable business impact through improved product discovery, recommendation relevance, and purchase conversion.\n\nYou will be at the center of fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation, ensuring assistant improvements are rigorously evaluated using both offline and online metrics. Your work will directly influence business impact, improving engagement, retention, and long-term customer value through conversational AI.\n\nINCLUSIVE BY DESIGN\n\nAt Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit.\n\nWe want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process.\ndo.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy\nOur employee resource groups: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups\n\nWHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)\n• Design and build conversational AI agents\n• Develop and integrate RAG pipelines to enrich experiences with fresh, contextual data\n• Design, tune, and evaluate LLM prompts to improve response quality and user engagement\n• Integrate LLMs with search, recommendation, and external APIs\n• Define and implement evaluation frameworks for conversation quality and grounding\n• Run experiments and optimize assistant performance for business KPIs (conversion, engagement, retention)\n• Own the architecture, development, and deployment of LLM-powered agent workflows\n• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and data science teams\n• Mentor colleagues and share best practices in applied AI and agent development\n\nWHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR\n• 10+ years of experience in the field of engineering or applied science.\n• Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade applications\n• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills\n• Experience optimizing AI systems for business KPIs\n\nAny of the following is a strong plus:\n• Experience building LLM-powered applications or AI agents\n• Experience with prompt engineering, tuning, and evaluation\n• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, PydanticAI, DSPy, or similar\n• Experience integrating LLMs with external APIs, tools, and/or RAG systems\n• Experience evaluating conversation quality and defining LLM metrics is a plus\n• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, or retrieval systems\n\nOUR OFFER\nZalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.\n• Employee shares program\n• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, discounts from external partners\n• 2 paid volunteering days a year\n• Hybrid working model with 60% (or more) remote per week, actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration\n• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year\n• 27 days of vacation a year to start\n• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)\n• Family services, including counseling and support\n• Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass)\n• Mental health support and coaching available\n• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review Learn all about Zalando and our values here: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/?gh_src=22377bdd1us\n\nPlease note that all applications from this job page must be completed using the online form - we do not accept applications via e-mail. Once reviewed, our recruiters will contact applicants via an official Zalando email address (@zalando.de).\nIn some cases we also work with a selection of headhunters and agencies to fill specific roles. Please note that neither Zalando nor our recruiting partners will ask for any kind of payment to apply for a job or attend an interview.\nIf you have any questions about our recruitment process, please take a look at our FAQ page.\n\nSoftware Engineering\nOur Software Engineering teams deploy software extensively, managing a broad set of applications and conducting thousands of deployments per week. The Software Engineering team enables Zalando as Europe’s number one multi-brand, digital platform for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle for our partners and customers. As a Zalando Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a community of thousands of colleagues across Europe.\nLearn More\nSoftware Engineering\n\nAbout Zalando\nIt’s the perfect time to join Zalando on our journey to build the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce. Help us offer an inspiring and quality multi-brand shopping experience for fashion and lifestyle products to about 50 million active customers in 25 markets. Or be part of our logistic infrastructure, software or service capabilities to help brands and retailers run and scale their entire e-commerce business, on or off Zalando. Join our Zalando ecosystem, to enable positive change for the fashion and lifestyle industry.\nLearn more about our culture","responsibilities_text":"Zalando’s Zalando Assistant team is looking for a Principal AI Scientist to help us build the future of retail through conversational AI experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and intelligent agents. Your expertise will be key in designing and developing AI-driven systems that support fashion discovery, trend exploration, outfit recommendations, and conversational shopping experiences.\nAs a Principal AI Scientist, you’ll play a significant role in shaping the architecture and capabilities of the Zalando Assistant. You will work on AI agents, RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, and LLM integrations, ensuring high-quality, grounded, and engaging conversations. Your domain will span the full customer lifecycle, helping drive customer activation, engagement, retention, and conversion through intelligent conversational experiences.\nThis is a hands-on role with direct impact on customer-facing experiences. You will build and improve production AI agents used by millions of customers, working closely with product and engineering partners to deliver measurable business impact through improved product discovery, recommendation relevance, and purchase conversion.\nYou will be at the center of fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation, ensuring assistant improvements are rigorously evaluated using both offline and online metrics. Your work will directly influence business impact, improving engagement, retention, and long-term customer value through conversational AI.\nINCLUSIVE BY DESIGN\nAt Zalando, our vision is to be inclusive by design. And this vision starts with our hiring - we do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, personal expression, ethnicity, religious belief, or disability status. You are welcome to leave out your picture, age, or marital status from your application. We only assess candidates on their qualifications and merit.\nWe want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support you throughout the hiring process.\ndo.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/dobetter-our-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy\nOur employee resource groups: https://corporate.zalando.com/en/our-impact/our-employee-resource-groups\nWHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)\n• Design and build conversational AI agents\n• Develop and integrate RAG pipelines to enrich experiences with fresh, contextual data\n• Design, tune, and evaluate LLM prompts to improve response quality and user engagement\n• Integrate LLMs with search, recommendation, and external APIs\n• Define and implement evaluation frameworks for conversation quality and grounding\n• Run experiments and optimize assistant performance for business KPIs (conversion, engagement, retention)\n• Own the architecture, development, and deployment of LLM-powered agent workflows\n• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and data science teams\n• Mentor colleagues and share best practices in applied AI and agent development","requirements_text":"• 10+ years of experience in the field of engineering or applied science.\n• Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade applications\n• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills\n• Experience optimizing AI systems for business KPIs\nAny of the following is a strong plus:\n• Experience building LLM-powered applications or AI agents\n• Experience with prompt engineering, tuning, and evaluation\n• Experience with agent frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, PydanticAI, DSPy, or similar\n• Experience integrating LLMs with external APIs, tools, and/or RAG systems\n• Experience evaluating conversation quality and defining LLM metrics is a plus\n• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, or retrieval systems\nOUR OFFER\nZalando provides a range of benefits, here’s an overview of what you can expect. Ask your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about what we offer.\n• Employee shares program\n• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Zalando Lounge, discounts from external partners\n• 2 paid volunteering days a year\n• Hybrid working model with 60% (or more) remote per week, actual practice is up to each team to best support their collaboration\n• Work from abroad for up to 30 working days a year\n• 27 days of vacation a year to start\n• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)\n• Family services, including counseling and support\n• Health and wellbeing options (including Gympass)\n• Mental health support and coaching available\n• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review Learn all about Zalando and our values here: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/?gh_src=22377bdd1us\nPlease note that all applications from this job page must be completed using the online form - we do not accept applications via e-mail. Once reviewed, our recruiters will contact applicants via an official Zalando email address (@zalando.de).\nIn some cases we also work with a selection of headhunters and agencies to fill specific roles. Please note that neither Zalando nor our recruiting partners will ask for any kind of payment to apply for a job or attend an interview.\nIf you have any questions about our recruitment process, please take a look at our FAQ page.\nSoftware Engineering\nOur Software Engineering teams deploy software extensively, managing a broad set of applications and conducting thousands of deployments per week. The Software Engineering team enables Zalando as Europe’s number one multi-brand, digital platform for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle for our partners and customers. As a Zalando Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a community of thousands of colleagues across Europe.\nLearn More\nSoftware Engineering","status":"open","duplicate_of":null,"first_seen":"2026-11-02T15:49:35.456075+00:00","responsibilities_summary":"Design and build conversational AI agents and RAG pipelines, tune and evaluate LLM prompts, integrate LLMs with search, recommendation and external APIs, define evaluation frameworks, optimize assistant performance for business KPIs, and mentor colleagues.","requirements_summary":"10+ years in engineering or applied science, strong Python and production-grade application experience, strong analytical skills, and experience optimizing AI systems for business KPIs. LLM agent, prompt engineering, and RAG experience is a plus.","all_tools":["Python","LLM","LangChain","LlamaIndex","RAG"],"posting_language":"en","evidence":[],"years_experience_max":null,"mobility_evidence":[{"kind":"relocation","quote":"Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)","value":"offered"}],"model_version":"claude-haiku-5-5","english_badge":"English not stated","company_id":181}