Senior 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

• 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…