Applied Scientist – LLMs & Agentic AI

About the role

Join Zalando's Customer Care Technology team in Berlin as an Applied Scientist focused on large language models and agentic AI. You will design, build and scale AI systems that power self‑service solutions for millions of customer queries each month.

Key responsibilities

• Translate business challenges into structured research plans and drive projects from discovery to production deployment.
• Design, evaluate and scale deep‑learning and LLM applications, including predictive models and agentic workflows.
• Own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of AI models in production, handling design, performance optimisation, deployment and monitoring.
• Collaborate with product managers, data engineers and software engineers to embed AI solutions into customer‑service products.

Required profile

• Proven experience delivering research projects and productionising customer‑facing AI products.
• Strong expertise in machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing, with a focus on LLM applications.
• Solid understanding of modern AI architectures, including agentic workflows and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG).
• Excellent communication skills for presenting technical concepts to both technical peers and business stakeholders.

Required skills

• Python programming, including PyTorch and Pydantic frameworks.
• SQL and experience with data platforms such as Databricks.
• Deep‑learning, LLM and NLP techniques.
• Machine‑learning research and production engineering.

What we offer

• 27 days of holiday (increasing with tenure) plus 2 paid volunteering days.
• Employee share programme and up to 40% discount on fashion and beauty products.
• Relocation assistance, family services, health and wellbeing options, and mental‑health support.
• Opportunities for continuous development through training platforms and peer‑to‑peer reviews.