THE ROLE & THE TEAM
Our north star is agentic incident response: only paging engineers when an issue cannot be resolved automatically, and briefing them instantly with pre-validated root-cause analysis when they are paged. Achieving this requires a consolidated, high-quality telemetry stack — and that is what your team builds.
As an Engineering Manager (C8), you will lead a team of ~10 software engineers owning Zalando's Observability platform — the infrastructure that our entire engineering organisation of hundreds of teams depends on to understand, operate, and improve their systems. This is a role with unusual leverage: a focused team, a platform used at company scale, and a clear strategic direction that is ready to be executed. The EM who takes this role will shape how the team works, what it prioritises, and how it shows up for its customers — there is real room to leave a mark.
You will lead the consolidation of our observability tooling onto Dash0 as our unified platform for metrics, traces, logs, and SLOs, while owning the Observability SDKs used by every engineering team at Zalando to instrument their services. You will also drive the evolution of our incident management tooling through the OpsGenie end-of-life and into a modern, AI-integrated platform. Across all of this, your team operates with a platform mindset: the goal is always to reduce the cognitive load on our customers — the engineers building Zalando's products — not to add to it.
Find out more about our Software Engineering team: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/what-we-do/software-engineering
What We'd Love You To Do (and Love Doing)
- Lead the consolidation of our observability tooling — migrating to Dash0 as the unified telemetry platform and transitioning incident management off OpsGenie into a modern, AI-integrated platform — on a clear, committed timeline.
- Shape and execute the roadmap for our Observability SDKs — elevating them to a first-class company-wide product with automated upgrade tooling, instrumentation quality standards, and agentic PR workflows that improve telemetry across the fleet without manual effort from consuming teams.
- Own the long-term architectural roadmap for your team's systems, hold regular design reviews, and act as the accountable decision-maker for technical quality and delivery feasibility.
- Drive the team's contribution to our agentic incident response north star — ensuring that signal quality, SLO definitions, and platform architecture are ready for automated RCA, not just human-readable dashboards.
- Be accountable for the reliable operation of your team's production systems: defining, measuring, and improving SLOs; driving incident response and post-mortem follow-through; and managing infrastructure costs with improving unit economics.
- Attract, hire, develop, and retain diverse top engineering talent. Manage performance fairly and empathetically, maintain strong team health, and actively coach engineers on their career development.
WE'D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF
- You have experience managing engineering teams in an infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling domain — you think in platforms, not projects, and you know how to balance the needs of hundreds of internal customers with a coherent product vision.
- You have a strong background in distributed systems, observability, or reliability engineering — you are comfortable with OpenTelemetry, metrics pipelines, distributed tracing, SLOs, and incident response workflows.
- You know the architecture of the systems you own. You can spot technical and security risks in design reviews, evaluate delivery feasibility, and provide substantive guidance on architecture choices — this is a hands-on technical leadership role.
- You have driven large-scale platform migrations across many teams — you know how to align hundreds of consuming teams without making each one a manual project, and you have used automation or AI tooling to make adoption tractable at that scale.
- You have a concrete view of where agentic incident response is going — you can describe what needs to be true about signal quality and system architecture for automated RCA to be reliable, not just impressive in demos.
- You have led teams through transitions in scope, direction, or org structure — you know how to bring people with you rather than around them, and you can translate between technical depth and strategic direction for both engineers and senior stakeholders.
OUR OFFER
Zalando 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.
- 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (+1 day for every calendar year up to 30 days)
- 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners
- Family support, including counselling and dedicated services for parents and carers
- Company pension scheme
- Employee shares programme
- Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub
- Mental health support and coaching
- Development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review
- 2 paid volunteering days a year
- Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement)
INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN
If you think you have what it takes, we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every single requirement. You may just be the right candidate for this or other roles!
At Zalando, our vision is to be the leading European technology platform for fashion and lifestyle – one that thrives on diversity and is truly inclusive by design. We believe that diverse teams fuel innovation and creativity, and we actively seek out talent from all backgrounds.
We actively seek to reduce bias in our hiring and employment processes, focusing on your qualifications, skills, and contributions. To support this, we kindly ask that you refrain from including personal details such as your photo, age, or marital status in your CV, ensuring a fair and equitable evaluation based solely on your abilities and potential.
We are committed to providing an exceptional and accessible candidate experience for everyone. If you require any accommodations to support you throughout the hiring process, please let us know – we are here to assist you.
Discover more about our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/our-culture/diversity-and-inclusion
