Staff Engineer, Absences

About Personio

Personio offers an intelligent HR platform specially designed for small and medium enterprises to streamline complex and time-consuming HR tasks efficiently. Our growing team of 1,500 employees crafts user-centric solutions serving over 15,000 customers and 1.5 million employees worldwide.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Absences team within Personio’s Time domain, working onsite in Munich, Berlin, or London with a hybrid schedule requiring two days weekly in the office. This critical position focuses on steering the development and technical strategy for software managing employee leave and absence processes across various European markets, ensuring accurate integration with payroll systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architectural guidance of absence management systems including accruals and entitlements, setting exemplary standards adopted across engineering teams.
• Craft simple, scalable technical solutions to complex regulatory and domain-specific challenges, contributing hands-on with meaningful production-level coding.
• Oversee end-to-end execution of challenging, cross-team initiatives, ensuring quality and timely delivery.
• Develop models to handle diverse and complex regulations varying by country and company, minimizing spread of complexity across the system.
• Guarantee accurate and trustworthy absence data inputs into payroll, prioritizing correctness, reliability, and transparency.
• Elevate operational excellence by defining best practices for deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of mission-critical services.
• Mentor senior engineers through design collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership by example to uplift technical standards across teams.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Proven expertise in backend and distributed systems engineering with experience delivering reliable solutions in production environments where accuracy is essential.
• Strong systems thinking to understand the interaction of multiple services and team contributions, designing effective APIs and contracts.
• Architectural decision-making emphasizing simplicity and robustness, especially in domains with regulatory variability.
• Hands-on experience contributing substantive code while guiding teams technically.
• Established record of cross-team leadership managing long-term projects culminating in dependable product releases.
• Deep understanding of continuous integration, delivery pipelines, observability, and maintaining high service reliability.
• Experience in coaching engineers and positively influencing technical cultures to raise quality benchmarks.
• Practical knowledge of integrating AI tools to optimize workflows with sound judgment on their application.

Company Culture and Benefits

Personio is committed to fostering an inclusive environment appreciating individual uniqueness and diversity. We support hybrid work models with a required office presence of two days weekly plus flexible remote work options including 20 flex days annually to work from other locations.

Our comprehensive benefits include a competitive salary and equity package, 28 paid vacation days with increases after 2 and 4 years, a fully paid Impact Day yearly, generous family leave policies, mental health resources, sabbatical options, and regular team events with healthy office amenities.