Software Engineer Ad Platform (all genders)

THE ROLE & THE TEAM Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) is revolutionizing e-commerce marketing by helping partners build love brands, create strong customer relationships, and accelerate their business through data-infused, inspirational marketing strategies. Within ZMS, the Ad Marketplace domain is on a mission to put the right ad in front of the right customer at the right time, delivering value to partners while building trust through efficient monetization strategies. As a Software Engineer in the Ad Platform team, you'll be at the heart of our advertising technology ecosystem, building and maintaining the critical infrastructure that powers our ad marketplace. You'll work on high-performance systems that handle thousands of requests per second, process massive volumes of user interaction events in near real-time, and manage hundreds of terabytes of data. Your expertise will be instrumental in developing advanced experimentation capabilities in our two-sided marketplace, directly impacting the success of our partners' campaigns and ZMS's financial performance. This role offers a unique opportunity to solve complex technical challenges at scale while contributing to a platform that connects ~50 million active customers across 25 European markets with fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands. WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING) Develop High-Performance Systems: Implement scalable, resilient services that power our ad marketplace platform, handling up to 4k RPS with strict latency requirements (p99 of 50ms 😉) Deliver Features: Decompose epics into manageable tasks, owning the execution from requirement refinement through to deployment and production operations Maintain Engineering Excellence: Elevate our codebase through readable, testable, and maintainable code, writing automated tests and defining clear acceptance criteria Collaborate and Share Knowledge: Actively participate in team discussions, help skill-up your peers, and partner with Product Managers, Analysts, and ML Ops to fill requirement gaps Operate What You Build: Deliver the supporting operational elements (metrics, alerting, graphs, tracing) to monitor performance and assist in root-cause analysis during production incidents WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF You're Inspired by Quality: You're passionate about clean code, readability, comprehensive testing, and building a culture of engineering excellence You're a Collaborative Builder: You enjoy sharing knowledge, helping your team grow, and constructively contributing to established team processes You're Tech-Savvy: You have deep experience with Java, Spring, and distributed systems, with knowledge of our tech stack (or eagerness to learn) You Deconstruct Complexity: Faced with a set of requirements, you can methodically break them down into small, safe deployment iterations while navigating technical constraints You're Product-Aware: You collaborate with product teams to understand user needs, call out…