We talked to the team at Zalando’s Dublin hub about fashion, technology and its growing Irish base.
Zalando is an online fashion platform with more than 31m customers around Europe and a growing technology hub in Dublin.
We recently visited the team there to learn more about the company’s mission and work, as well as what it’s looking for in new hires.
We spoke to Becky Byrne – Zalando’s head of product for digital experience, customer personalisation and profile – who described the work taking place at the company’s Dublin hub as “quite exciting”.
“We work with product design, engineering, data science and machine learning specialists, and we apply those to software products that really make an impact to our customers,” she explained.
“For instance, we’re working on ways to allow customers to identify topics that are important to them, such as sustainability within their clothing choices and also helping them to enable to reuse and resell their clothing.”
‘Receptive and challenging of ideas’
Séamus Ó Ceanainn is a software engineer at the company, but he first joined as a graduate – an experience he would “highly recommend”.
“I didn’t go and do, you know, three or six months of training and then start working,” he explained. “I was placed directly on the team. They put a lot of emphasis on personal development at all stages – I’m here a year and a half now and I’m still learning as much as I was when I first joined.”
Elsewhere, talent acquisition partner Zara McBrien gave us some insights into the types of people Zalando is currently on the lookout for.
“Because we are growing the team and they’re working on high-scale platforms, we do need people coming from good engineering backgrounds, but also coupled with the product mindset as well,” she said.
“What stands out in terms of candidates is those that are obviously invested in the industry topics, that want to get involved and want to help our customers with the problems that they face, and obviously working in a high-performing team, but also having fun at work as well.”
Byrne added that she would “love to see people join Zalando that are willing to work as part of a larger team to build something great, to bring their own areas of expertise and are willing to be both receptive and challenging of other’s ideas”.
