Senior Risk Mitigation Manager

As the Senior Risk Mitigation Manager, you will lead a vital function within Customer Care Operations Excellence dedicated to managing operational risk, verifying complex customer claims, and handling critical escalations. In this C7 role, you will lead and develop a team of 4 Risk Mitigation Leads, guiding them as they oversee expert teams responsible for operational claim verification, ensuring accurate refund decisions, managing financial exposure, and executing GDPR compliance and public escalation protocols.

• Disciplinary Leadership of Leaders: Directly manage, evaluate, and develop a team of 4 Risk Mitigation Leads. Foster inclusive leadership and high team engagement, providing development opportunities and coaching your directs to effectively lead their own high-stakes operational teams executing claim verifications and refund decisions.
• Drive Operational Workflow Optimization: Independently define problem statements regarding internal team efficiency and case handling at the pillar level. You will apply deep knowledge of Zalando's data landscape to automate internal workflows, standardize, and optimize how agents execute claim verifications and escalations.
• Champion Strategic Risk Reduction & Delivery: Translate complex customer and business issues into clear operational project plans. Define and monitor KPI targets on a pillar level (e.g., general operational performance, claim verification accuracy, privacy compliance, reputational risk). Anticipate risks in global operational processes, assess them, and trigger required countermeasures.
• Steer Critical Incidents & Executive Stakeholder Management: Supervise the operational handling of major incidents (e.g., severe operational fraud attempts, PR crises, complex refund escalations) while ensuring all key stakeholders (internal and external) are involved at an early stage. Establish long-lasting relationships at the pillar level and above, acting as the operational counterpart to Fraud Intelligence, and present work-in-progress and strategic solutions to internal senior management.
• Process Sustainment & Standardization: Pay close attention to process details, ensuring excellent output through high documentation standards and best practices in operational decision-making. Stress-test your own solutions, proactively identify inefficiencies, and initiate cross-departmental measures to improve how customer claims and risks are operationally processed.
• Community Contribution & Mentorship: Act as a role model by initiating knowledge transfer and best practice sharing across teams. Train and mentor colleagues across your department, actively shape internal events, and raise the bar by conducting interviews during the recruiting process.

• Leadership of Leaders: Solid experience managing managers in a customer care operations, risk management, escalations, or compliance-focused environment. Demonstrable success in building high-performing operational teams and fostering inclusive engagement.
• Operational Risk & Process Excellence & Governance: Explicit and proven capability in customer-centricity, strategic thinking and overarching process excellence improvement within an operational setting. You have in-depth experience in eCommerce Customer Care, know industry standards for claim verification and refund management, and can identify and prioritize value-adding tasks that move the department toward its strategic goals.
• Data-Driven Problem Solving: Strong analytical skills with the ability to apply logical, easy-to-understand frameworks to complex operational issues. Capable of using data and simple statistical models to provide evidence in root cause analyses and validate solutions with stakeholders early in the lifecycle.
• Deep Understanding of Operational Compliance: Significant expertise in operationalizing data privacy (GDPR) requirements, executing fraud mitigation procedures, and managing reputational risk, coupled with the ability to anticipate global process risks and implement mitigations.
• Exceptional Senior Stakeholder Management: Proven ability to effectively collaborate with, influence, and provide expert advice to senior stakeholders in Fraud Intelligence, Legal, Compliance, and Communications. You excel at translating complex operational process excellence matters into clear language for non-experts.
• Crisis Management & Resilience: High adaptability with a strong ethical compass and a proven track record of maintaining composure and driving strategic change through critical customer incidents, complex claim escalations, or significant regulatory shifts.