Zalando plans to hire 1,000 engineers

Zalando has plans to hire 1,000 engineers throughout the course of next year. If this really happens, it would be a major increase of the German fashion retailer’s technology team, that currently counts 1,600 people.

The plans are revealed by a leaked memo that’s seen by Business Insider, which calls the intentions of Zalando a “aggressive hiring spree”. In the memo, Terry Swann, Zalando’s global head of talent, is looking for at least five technical recruiters of varying seniority at Zalando in Berlin. “The salary range is €35-€60, which goes a long way in Berlin (you can get a flat in the center of town for less than 1000 a month). The task is to hire 1,000 engineers in 2017, please message me directly if you’re at all interested. Thanks!”

Comment caused a lot of discussion

Swann submitted this request in a Slack channel that’s being used by hundreds of talent managers and recruitment execs from European tech companies. According to Business Insider, the comment caused quite a lot discussion in the channel.

After the blog wrote about the leaked message, Zalando reacted by saying they announced in 2014 that they are changing their business model from an online retailer to become the leading online fashion platform in Europe. “In order to achieve this goal we started to accelerate the growth of our technology team.”

New headquarters in Berlin

Currently, Zalando has about 11,200 employees globally. The German fashion retailer is in the process of building a new headquarters in Berlin, which will open in 2018. There, up to 5,000 employees can work for the fashion giant.