Principal Product Manager Marketing Automation - Lounge by Zalando (all genders)

THE ROLE & THE TEAM

Lounge by Zalando is an online shopping club for fashion and lifestyle products, serving millions of members across 20+ European markets through daily, time-limited sale campaigns. The Growth & Lifecycle team owns the growth engine of Lounge — the services dedicated to delivering the right message to the right people at the right time, on a global scale, to over a million users daily.

As Principal Product Manager, you are the marketing-technology expert in the mission's product leadership. The Head of Product owns growth strategy and the multidisciplinary organisation; you own the product behind the marketing: the campaign and product data hubs feeding every marketing channel, the Braze-based lifecycle messaging platform and its real-time triggers, the layer connecting data-science models (churn, next-best-action) to customer communications, server-side tracking and privacy infrastructure, and the AI systems that increasingly run marketing on their own. You understand this estate from both sides — what CRM and marketing teams need from it, and what it takes to deliver that — and you turn that understanding into the roadmap. In architecture discussions with Principal Engineers you own the what and the why while they own the how; in commercial discussions you make the platform's realities legible to marketing and business leadership.

This is a leading individual-contributor role for an experienced marketing-technology product manager who wants to solve complex, high-impact platform problems in tandem with Principal Engineers — with the option to mentor senior product managers as the team grows.

Your mandate: own the product at the heart of the growth engine — and lead its leap to autonomous, self-checking, revenue-generating marketing.
 

INCLUSIVE BY DESIGN
At Zalando, our vision is to be the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce - one that is inclusive by design. We only assess candidates based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We welcome applications from people of all gender identities, sexual orientations, personal expressions, racial identities, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and disability statuses. We only want to know why you’re great for this role, so please avoid including your picture, age, and marital status in your CV as well.
We want to provide you with a great candidate experience. Please feel free to inform us of any accommodations you may need, so we can best support and assist you throughout the hiring process.
do.BETTER - our diversity & inclusion strategy: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/our-culture/diversity-and-inclusion

WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

• Own the platform product strategy: Define and execute the strategy for Lounge's growth platform — data hubs, messaging infrastructure, feed and content pipelines, automation services — and keep it aligned with the mission's charter, commercial goals, and the wider Zalando ecosystem.

• Deliver the autonomous-marketing engine: Own the product side of the mission's headline commitment — AI marketing agents for Paid, SEO, and CRM that plan, execute, and optimise campaigns in production — with the evaluation pipelines, guardrails, and incrementality measurement that prove their value beyond the demo.

• Build the zero-touch operational backbone: Drive campaign quality assurance from ~50% to fully automated — bots validating deep links, copy, and voucher configurations — and grow the share of revenue driven by automated systems into a headline KPI.

• Anchor the product–engineering interface: Represent product in architecture-level decisions with Principal Engineers — APIs, event streams, data models, build-vs-buy — translate technical trade-offs into decisions commercial leadership can own, and manage strategic vendors (messaging, content, and media platforms) through evaluation, contracting, and integration.

• Make compliance a feature: Ensure personalisation and messaging are GDPR-compliant by design — consent, pseudonymisation, data deletion — so that scale never comes at the cost of trust.

• Raise the technical bar of the product organisation: Produce product artifacts that become best practice (PRFAQs, solution designs, KPI frameworks), mentor product managers, and lift the technical fluency of the product team around you.

WE’D LOVE TO MEET YOU IF YOU HAVE

• Martech understood from both sides: Deep, hands-on experience with modern marketing technology — ESP/CRM platforms (Braze or comparable), customer data platforms, product feeds, campaign automation, server-side tracking — and, just as importantly, a real understanding of the marketing practice these systems serve: campaign operations, segmentation, deliverability, personalisation economics.

• Platform product experience: An extensive track record managing marketing or data platforms as products — turning infrastructure into roadmaps, and architecture trade-offs into business decisions.

• Technical fluency, without needing to be an engineer: You are comfortable in architecture discussions — APIs, event streams, data models, build-vs-buy — fluent enough to represent product credibly with Principal Engineers and lead technical product discovery. An engineering past is welcome but not required; sound technical judgment is.

• AI-native product leadership: You have shipped LLM- or ML-powered products to production — personalisation, triggers, or agentic automation — and can speak concretely about evaluation, guardrails, observability, and what changes when the model changes. You have a grounded view of what autonomous agents can and cannot do today.

• Experimentation rigor: A strong record of hypothesis-driven development — A/B testing at scale, incrementality measurement, and KPI-driven prioritisation.

• Bilingual communication: You are equally at home in an architecture deep-dive and an executive summary — and you routinely translate one into the other, making deep technical reality legible to non-technical leadership.

• Craft excellence: Written artifacts (strategies, PRFAQs, solution designs) that others reuse as templates; you work autonomously in ambiguous problem space.

• Scale experience: You have built for high-volume consumer products — millions of users, multi-channel, multi-country.

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.

• Employee shares program

• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners

• 2 paid volunteering days a year

• 27 days of vacation a year to start for full-time employees

• Relocation assistance available (subject to prior agreement)

• Family services, including counseling and support

• Health and wellbeing options (including Wellhub, formerly Gympass)

• Mental health support and coaching available

• Drive your development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review