Pros
- Very software and data-driven company. - Great technical challenges for any type of engineers. - Well defined tech lifecycle management process with enough restrictions and permissions to drive the big changes. - Relatively low bureaucracy, sometimes too low. - Inclusive engineering community that will support you with your ideas, provide challenge and expertise. - Great SRE practices and continuous operational efficiency improvement. - If you are a leader - you will have enough opportunities to show yourself. Main point - you can really influence the delivery of great things and change the way the company works. It is still possible thanks to Zalando internal culture and non-overburdened processes.
Cons
- Engineering teams have not aligned in terms of grades. For example, some teams might have very strong Senior Engineers with matured ownership and cautious decision making and in the others you might find a Senior Engineer who acts like a toddler. Salary is same though. - Mechanism to really make the level of your contributions transparent is still in the "emerging" state. You can set "Focus areas", commit and achieve the goals, but grading your contributions is non transparent at the moment. Thus, career perspectives are not always clear. - Somewhat great strategical visions not always backed up by a particular responsible executive person. Waiting until data strategy will implement itself is not very efficient tactics to achieve the goals. Same happens with some company-wide engineering process which is assumed to autonomously adopted by teams (like risk-management), but it's not always the case.