Engineering Manager - Developer Experience (Java/Kotlin) - (d/f/m)

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading engineers as a people manager (typically 2+ years), including coaching, performance support, hiring, and building healthy team practices.
• Ability to set direction, prioritize effectively, and deliver outcomes in an environment with multiple stakeholders and competing needs.
• Strong software engineering experience (typically 5+ years) building production backend systems.
• Required: previous hands-on professional experience in Java as an engineer (building and shipping backend services/components).
• Strong plus: hands-on experience with Kotlin (or strong interest in working in Kotlin-heavy codebases).
• Motivation to build internal products that other engineers love to use: you care about usability, documentation, adoption, and feedback loops.
• Ability to balance long-term foundations work with short-term developer needs and iterative delivery.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product domains, and leadership.
• Ability to drive standards through partnership and influence—not just enforcement.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building or operating shared frameworks/libraries used by multiple teams.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) and common messaging patterns.
• Experience owning internal APIs/SDKs and managing versioning/backward compatibility.
• Familiarity with observability and performance tooling (profilers, tracing, metrics) for backend systems.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Leading, coaching, and growing a team of engineers working on backend foundations and developer experience.
• Building an inclusive, high-performance culture where engineers take ownership and continuously improve how Personio builds software.
• Driving the roadmap for inter-service communication, partnering with product-domain teams, and defining API standards.
• Leading initiatives across frameworks, shared libraries, SDKs, and low-level components.

Perks and Benefits:

• Competitive reward package – reevaluated each year – including salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity
• 28 days of paid vacation, plus additional days after 2 and 4 years
• 1 (fully paid) Impact Day to make an impact on the environment and society
• Generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities
• Team gatherings, cultural initiatives, and events like Summer Sessions and year-end celebrations
• Healthy snacks, drinks, and a weekly catered lunch