Senior Staff Software Engineer / L7 Tech Lead (Developer Experience)

Personio's intelligent HR platform helps small and medium-sized organizations unlock the power of people by making complicated, time-consuming tasks simple and efficient. Our team of 1,500 Personios is building user-friendly products that delight our 15,000+ customers and their 1.5 million employees. Ready to make an impact from day one? This role requires 2 days a week in our Munich or Dublin office. Join us to shape the future of software in the underserved and high-impact HR technology industry. Your work will have a direct and tangible impact on customers, offering ownership and the chance to make a meaningful difference. As we prepare for significant growth, you'll face exciting challenges and have the opportunity to influence our path toward becoming one of the world's leading tech companies. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead) in Developer Experience (DX), you'll set organization-wide technical direction for developer productivity across Personio's entire engineering stack with an AI first mindset - from backend services in Kotlin and Java, through protos, gRPC, Kafka and GraphQL, to CI/CD and build systems, across our frontend and Node.js, React, TypeScript and PHP ecosystems. You'll be a technical multiplier: not managing people, but shaping how hundreds of engineers build, test, and ship software every day. This is a hands-on, deeply technical role. You'll pair architectural judgment with the credibility to drive change across teams that don't report to you — reducing friction across the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), scaling CI/CD and build infrastructure, defining and improving testing capabilities, and bringing AI-powered tooling safely into everyday engineering work. It’s not enough to just have opinions on a good developer experience, you’ll need the judgement and experience to drive adoption of those standards. What You’ll Do Set Technical Strategy for Developer Experience - Own the technical strategy for DX: simplify the stack and data flow, and architect how CI/CD, build orchestration, testing frameworks, and underlying tooling evolve together. - Act as a technical multiplier — aligning disparate engineering groups, establishing company-wide best practices, and driving complex, multi-team initiatives without direct authority. - Mentor senior and staff-level engineers across DX and partner teams, raising the technical bar org-wide. Scale CI/CD, Build, Test, and Release Systems - Own the technical direction for CI/CD pipelines, build orchestration, and release automation across a polyglot codebase (Kotlin, Java, TypeScript, PHP) to increase developer productivity. - Streamline the local development inner loop, testing frameworks (including end-to-end testing), and CI feedback cycles to accelerate how quickly engineers can ship safely. - Evaluate and evolve our GitHub-based workflows, tooling, and stacks to keep pace with engineering growth. Backend Platform: Microservices, Protos, gRPC, Kafka - Provide technical leadership on the backbone of service-to-service communication: proto/gRPC contracts, API evolution, and Kafka-based eventing patterns that underpin our microservices architecture. - Partner with backend platform and product-domain teams to define standards for API design, versioning, backward compatibility, and resilience. Frontend DX, Frameworks & AI Productivity Tools - Provide technical direction for the frontend developer experience: Node.js tooling, React and TypeScript frameworks, shared component and build tooling, and the developer-facing surface of our frontend platform. - Ensure frontend and backend DX investments are coherent, shared standards for testing, tooling, and release practices regardless of language or stack. - Lead the safe, scaled integration of AI-powered developer tools, internal engineering copilots, and intelligent triage or automation systems into the SDLC. - Evaluate emerging AI tooling and frameworks, and set guardrails and adoption patterns so teams can use them confidently and safely. Cross-Team Leadership & Influence - Work closely with engineering leaders, EMs, and staff engineers across Personio to align priorities and manage dependencies across many services and teams. - Communicate technical strategy, trade-offs, and progress clearly to both engineering and leadership audiences. - Represent DX in architecture reviews and technical decision-making forums, keeping solutions pragmatic and adoptable at scale. What You Need To Succeed Technical Depth & Breadth - 8+ years of software engineering experience with a deep focus on developer tooling and productivity, with experience in platform engineering or infrastructure a bonus. - Expert, hands-on proficiency across core languages relevant to our stack: Kotlin, Java, TypeScript. - Production experience with microservices architectures, including protos, gRPC, and Kafka-based eventing. - Comfortable operating in cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, AWS) and with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform). - Working proficiency with Node.js, React, and TypeScript, and an understanding of the frontend developer experience — tooling, build performance, and framework evolution. CI/CD, Testing & Build Systems Expertise - Hands-on mastery of build orchestration and CI/CD platforms (e.g., GitHub Actions), including designing pipelines that scale to hundreds or thousands of engineers. - Experience with testing strategy, including end-to-end testing frameworks, and improving feedback-cycle speed without sacrificing safety. AI-First Mindset - Practical experience with, or strong point of view on, AI-powered developer tooling (like Claude Code, Codex, Cubic) and how to roll these out safely at scale. - Experience building or rolling out internal AI agents or developer-facing AI tooling. Collaboration & Influence - Proven track record of driving complex, multi-team technical initiatives without direct authority. - Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to move fluidly between deep technical discussion and leadership-level framing. Nice to Have - Experience with build systems (e.g., Bazel, Nx) at scale. - Experience with PHP in a production environment. - Contributions to open-source developer tooling or CI/CD ecosystems. - Experience in a fast-growing, multi-stack engineering organization. Why Personio? Personio is an equal opportunities employer, committed to building an integrative culture where everyone feels welcomed and supported. We embrace uniqueness and understand that our diverse, values-driven culture makes us stronger. We are proud to have an inclusive workplace environment that will foster your development no matter your gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, education level, or race. At Personio, we value in-person collaboration while also offering flexibility. This role is office-based, with 2 days per week required in your contracted office location. The remaining days can be worked from home or in the office if you prefer. In addition, you’ll have 20 Flex Days per year to work remotely from other locations. Aside from our people, culture, and mission, check out some of the other benefits that make Personio a great place to work: - Receive a competitive reward package – reevaluated each year – that includes salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity - Enjoy 28 days of paid vacation, plus an additional day after 2 and 4 years - Make an impact on the environment and society with 1 (fully paid) Impact Day - Receive generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities - We enjoy gathering for meals, cultural initiatives, and events like local Summer Sessions and year-end celebrations. There's also healthy snacks, drinks, and a weekly catered lunch.