Staff Software Engineer - Reliability

About Personio

Personio develops an intelligent HR platform to assist small and medium enterprises in efficiently managing people operations by simplifying complex and time-intensive tasks. With a global team of 1,500 employees, Personio powers more than 15,000 customers and their 1.5 million employees, committed to delivering best-in-class user experiences.

Role Overview

The company is hiring experienced staff software engineers to join their central Reliability team in Munich, Berlin, Dublin, or Remote locations within Germany and Ireland. This role offers ownership and the chance to impact the future of software in the HR tech space, facing stimulating challenges as Personio prepares for rapid expansion.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and develop platform components and automated tools, including AI-powered agents, to enable engineering teams to effortlessly scale infrastructure and integrate reliability practices directly into development workflows.
• Participate throughout full service lifecycles—from design to deployment, operation, continuous improvement, and launch assessments.
• Operate mission-critical services, lead incident responses on complex issues, and convert insights into organizational standards and tooling.
• Build and maintain observability frameworks such as dashboards and monitoring stacks (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch) to enhance logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Formulate resilience strategies to detect vulnerabilities early and validate recovery procedures.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to maintain scalable, reliable, and observable services.
• Minimize manual operational work by automating tasks, tuning alerts for better signal-to-noise ratio, and creating self-healing capabilities.
• Collaborate on security posture and compliance audits related to operational reliability.
• Mentor and disseminate reliability knowledge across engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Eight or more years of SaaS software development experience focused on distributed systems, proficient in languages such as Kotlin, Java, TypeScript, and Python, and experienced with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Docker, and Kubernetes.
• At least four years of expertise in designing, running, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of modern monitoring and observability tools; hands-on experience with Datadog is a plus.
• Proven ability to reduce on-call workloads through automation, alert tuning, and self-healing systems.
• Exceptional problem-solving and debugging aptitude coupled with a strong ownership mindset.
• Demonstrated leadership in advancing technical initiatives across multiple teams and influencing engineering strategies.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills.
• Collaborative approach, capable of effective cross-disciplinary communication.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Kafka and Debezium connectors.
• Proficiency in managing SQL databases at scale.
• Experience fine-tuning JVM-based and Node.js runtime environments.

Company Culture & Benefits

Personio is devoted to fostering an inclusive and diverse work environment, supporting all employees regardless of background. The role is primarily office-based with flexibility to work remotely two days per week, plus 20 additional Flex Days annually to work from other locations.

• Annual competitive compensation package including salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity.
• 28 paid vacation days yearly, with extra days after two and four years of service.
• One fully paid Impact Day dedicated to environmental and societal contributions.
• Comprehensive family leave, child support, mental health resources, and sabbatical options.
• Regular social events such as shared meals, cultural programs, and celebrations, plus access to healthy snacks, drinks, and weekly catered lunches.