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