Zalando Tech is growing, with our tech hubs spread throughout Europe: Besides our headquarters in Berlin, we’re in Dortmund, Dublin, and Helsinki, and have smaller Tech teams located in our fulfillment centers in Erfurt and Mönchengladbach. But did you know that we’re also in Hamburg? We’d like to introduce you to another member of the Zalando family: Zalando AdTech Lab Hamburg.

How does our latest hub fit into Zalando’s platform strategy, Real time advertising is a developing trend that allows brands to reach customers with a totally new level of precision. In this field, Zalando’s interests aren’t purely advert driven: We’re also moving ahead as a service provider for partner brands with our newly launched business unit, Zalando Media Solutions. Our Hamburg-based office comes, thanks to the longstanding experience from previously acquired AdTech specialist Metrigo, with a big chain of products, tools, and experts in this area.

The Hamburg hub has 20 employees involved in product management, engineering, and data science to support the Zalando advertising platform. This includes programmatic buying, attribution, and reporting.

The hub also has a low-level, high-throughput stack that is very data heavy. They’re programming in Java, Scala, Ruby, and Python along with data analysis in Apache Spark and other technologies. A framework for ad hoc data-aggregation has been developed based on Jupyter.

Apart from that, we’ve made machine learning one of our key pillars. Our team is currently evaluating deep learning as an alternative to classical approaches. We’re investigating customer journeys and using machine learning, which allows us to find the best matching consumer audiences for our brand partners. We’re also actively using recurrent neuronal networks and deep learning via Google’s TensorFlow to understand user behaviour, in connection with the resulting customer clusters on the Zalando website. Real Time Advertising plays a key role in our operations as well.

We're hiring! Do you like working in an ever evolving organization such as Zalando? Consider joining our teams as a Data Engineer!