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

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?

The Role:

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 an Engineering Manager in Developer Experience (DX), you’ll lead a team building the foundational backend building blocks that enable product teams to ship services faster and more safely. With DX expanding beyond platform-infrastructure and DevOps tooling, this team will focus on low-level software components—such as frameworks, libraries, and inter-service communication patterns—that shape how services interact across Personio.

You’ll work on the “paved road” for backend development: API contracts, service-to-service communication, reliability and performance under the hood, and reusable components that teams can adopt confidently at scale.

What You’ll Do

Leading a High-Performing Foundations Team

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers working on backend foundations and developer experience.

• Build an inclusive, high-performance culture where engineers take ownership and continuously improve how Personio builds software.

• Support career development, feedback cycles, and healthy delivery practices.

Building the Backbone of Service-to-Service Communication

• Drive the roadmap for inter-service communication: how services discover each other, exchange data, evolve APIs, and remain compatible over time.

• Partner with product-domain teams to understand pain points and deliver reusable building blocks that reduce cognitive load and prevent repeated reinvention.

• Define and promote standards for API design, versioning, backward compatibility, error handling, and resilience patterns.

Low-Level Components, Frameworks & Libraries (Less DevOps, More Backend)

• Lead initiatives across frameworks, shared libraries, SDKs, and low-level components (e.g., eventing foundations such as Kafka-based patterns, communication abstractions, common middleware).

• Ensure that internal components are well-designed, well-documented, and easy to adopt, with clear ownership and support boundaries.

• Encourage a strong engineering discipline around testing, release processes, dependency management, and long-term maintainability for shared components.

Performance, Reliability & “Under-the-Hood” Excellence

• Guide the team to go deep: profiling, performance analysis, debugging production issues, and improving latency/throughput where it matters.

• Establish meaningful success metrics (e.g., adoption, reduced integration time, fewer incidents caused by communication issues, improved reliability of shared components).

• Facilitate architecture discussions and technical decisions with senior ICs, keeping solutions pragmatic and scalable.

Stakeholder & Cross-Team Collaboration

• Work closely with engineering leaders and partner teams to align on priorities and manage dependencies across many services.

• Communicate progress and trade-offs clearly, and drive alignment on standards without slowing down product delivery.

• Collaborate with adjacent DX areas (platform infrastructure, DevOps tooling, AI tooling) where relevant—while keeping the team primarily focused on backend foundations.

What You Need to Succeed

Engineering Management & Delivery

• 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 Backend Engineering Background (Java Required; Kotlin a Plus)

• 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).

• Comfortable engaging deeply in code and technical design discussions, particularly in areas like:

  • service-to-service communication patterns (synchronous and asynchronous)

  • API design and evolution

  • distributed systems fundamentals (reliability, consistency, failure modes)

  • performance and scalability considerations

Developer Experience & “Platform Product” Thinking

• 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.

Collaboration & Influence

• 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.

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.