Principal Product Manager Growth Platform - Lounge by Zalando (all genders)

Description

The company runs an online shopping club for fashion and lifestyle products, with millions of members in more than 20 European markets and daily sale campaigns that each run for a limited time.

The Growth & Lifecycle team runs the growth engine. Its services send the right message to the right people at the right time, at global scale, reaching over 1 million users a day.

The role sits in the mission's product leadership as the marketing technology lead. The Head of Product sets growth strategy and leads the multidisciplinary team, while you own the product behind marketing: the campaign and product data hubs, the Braze-based lifecycle messaging and its real-time triggers, the link between data science models such as churn and next-best-action and customer messages, server-side tracking and privacy infrastructure, and the AI systems that increasingly run marketing.

You define the what and the why with Principal Engineers, who own the how. With business and marketing leaders, you explain what the platform can and cannot do and turn that into the roadmap.

This is a senior individual contributor role for an experienced marketing technology product manager who wants to solve complex, high-impact platform problems alongside Principal Engineers. As the team grows, you may mentor senior product managers.

Your mandate is to own the product at the centre of the growth engine and lead it toward autonomous, self-checking marketing that generates revenue.

The company is a pan-European fashion and lifestyle e-commerce business that aims to be inclusive by design. Applicants are assessed only on qualifications, merit and business needs, so there is no need to include a photo, age or marital status in your CV.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy for the growth platform, covering data hubs, messaging infrastructure, feed and content pipelines and automation services, and keep it aligned with the mission charter, commercial goals and the wider company ecosystem.
• Own the product side of the mission's main commitment: AI marketing agents for paid, SEO and CRM that plan, run and optimise campaigns in production. Build the evaluation pipelines, guardrails and incrementality measurement that prove their value beyond a demo.
• Take campaign quality assurance from about 50% automated to fully automated, with bots checking deep links, copy and voucher setups. Make the share of revenue generated by automated systems a headline KPI.
• Represent product in architecture decisions with Principal Engineers on APIs, event streams, data models and build-versus-buy. Turn technical trade-offs into decisions commercial leaders can own, and manage strategic vendors for messaging, content and media, from evaluation and contracting through integration.
• Make personalisation and messaging GDPR-compliant by design, covering consent, pseudonymisation and data deletion, so that scale never costs the trust of users.
• Raise the technical bar of the product team by producing reusable artifacts such as PRFAQs, solution designs and KPI frameworks, mentoring product managers and building their technical fluency.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with modern martech, including ESP and CRM platforms such as Braze or comparable tools, customer data platforms, product feeds, campaign automation and server-side tracking.
• A working understanding of marketing practice, including campaign operations, segmentation, deliverability and the economics of personalisation.
• An extensive record of managing marketing or data platforms as products, turning infrastructure into roadmaps and architecture trade-offs into business decisions.
• Comfort in architecture discussions on APIs, event streams, data models and build-versus-buy, enough to represent product credibly to Principal Engineers and lead technical discovery. An engineering background is welcome but not required; sound technical judgment is required.
• Experience shipping LLM or ML products to production, such as personalisation, triggers or agentic automation, and the ability to discuss evaluation, guardrails and observability, and how behaviour changes when the model changes. A realistic view of what autonomous agents can and cannot do today.
• A strong record of hypothesis-driven development, including A/B testing at scale, incrementality measurement and KPI-driven prioritisation.
• The ability to explain deep technical topics to executives in plain language, and to move between an architecture deep-dive and an executive summary.
• Written strategies, PRFAQs and solution designs that others reuse as templates, and the ability to work independently in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Experience building for high-volume consumer products with millions of users across multiple channels and countries.

Conditions

The team is open about any accommodations you may need during the hiring process, so please tell them what would help.

Benefits

• Employee share programme.
• 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by the company, 30% off the shopping club, and discounts from external partners.
• 2 paid volunteering days a year.
• 27 days of vacation a year to start for full-time employees.
• Relocation assistance, subject to prior agreement.
• Family services, including counselling and support.
• Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub, formerly Gympass.
• Mental health support and coaching.
• Training through an internal learning platform and a biannual peer-to-peer review.