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 technic…