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

About the Company

Personio provides an intelligent HR platform designed to help small and medium-sized businesses simplify people-related work and operate more efficiently. The company serves more than 15,000 customers and supports over 1.5 million employees, with a team of around 1,500 people building products that are meant to be easy to use and valuable from day one.

The Opportunity

This position is part of Personio’s Developer Experience organization, where you will lead a team focused on the core backend foundations that help product teams release services more quickly and with greater confidence. The work centers on the “paved road” for backend engineering, including API contracts, service communication, reliability, performance, and reusable building blocks that can be adopted across the company.

The role is office-based and requires working from the Munich or Dublin office two days each week. The remaining time may be spent working from home or from the office, and the company also offers 20 Flex Days each year for remote work from other locations.

Key Responsibilities

You will guide a team that strengthens the backend and developer experience foundations used across Personio. Your focus will be to enable other engineering teams to ship safely, consistently, and with less duplication of effort.

• Lead, coach, and support engineers working on backend foundations and developer experience.
• Create a collaborative and high-performing team environment that encourages ownership and continuous improvement.
• Support growth conversations, feedback, and sustainable delivery habits.
• Own the roadmap for service-to-service communication, including discovery, data exchange, API evolution, and compatibility over time.
• Work with product-domain teams to identify friction points and deliver shared building blocks that reduce repeated work.
• Set and advocate standards for API design, versioning, backward compatibility, error handling, and resilience.
• Drive work across shared libraries, frameworks, SDKs, communication abstractions, and low-level components such as eventing foundations and Kafka-based patterns.
• Ensure internal components are easy to understand, well documented, maintainable, and supported with clear ownership boundaries.
• Promote strong engineering practices around testing, release management, dependency handling, and long-term maintainability.
• Guide the team in performance analysis, debugging, profiling, and improving latency and throughput where needed.
• Define practical success measures such as adoption, shorter integration time, fewer communication-related incidents, and stronger reliability.
• Support architecture discussions and technical decisions together with senior individual contributors.
• Coordinate with engineering leaders and partner teams to align priorities and manage cross-team dependencies.
• Communicate progress, trade-offs, and standards clearly without slowing delivery.
• Collaborate with adjacent DX areas such as platform infrastructure, DevOps tooling, and AI tooling when relevant, while keeping the team centered on backend foundations.

What We’re Looking For

The ideal candidate brings a mix of people leadership, backend engineering depth, and a strong product mindset for internal developer tools.

• At least 2 years of experience managing engineers, including coaching, performance support, hiring, and healthy team practices.
• Ability to set direction, prioritize well, and deliver results in a multi-stakeholder environment.
• About 5+ years of software engineering experience building production backend systems.
• Hands-on professional Java experience is required.
• Kotlin experience is a strong advantage, or at minimum a strong willingness to work in Kotlin-heavy codebases.
• Comfort with technical design and hands-on code discussions around synchronous and asynchronous service communication, API design and evolution, distributed systems reliability, consistency, failure modes, and scalability.
• Interest in building internal products that other engineers find easy to use and valuable, with attention to usability, documentation, adoption, and feedback loops.
• Ability to balance foundational long-term work with immediate developer needs and iterative delivery.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product domains, and leadership.
• Capability to influence and align teams through partnership rather than relying only on enforcement.
• Experience with shared frameworks or libraries used by multiple teams is a plus.
• Experience with event-driven systems such as Kafka and related messaging patterns is a plus.
• Experience owning internal APIs or SDKs, including versioning and backward compatibility, is a plus.
• Familiarity with observability and performance tooling such as profilers, tracing, and metrics is a plus.

Perks and Benefits

Personio offers a competitive reward package that is reviewed annually and includes salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity. Employees receive 28 days of paid vacation, plus one additional day after 2 years and another after 4 years. The company also provides 1 fully paid Impact Day, generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities. Additional workplace benefits include healthy snacks, drinks, weekly catered lunch, cultural initiatives, local Summer Sessions, year-end celebrations, and shared meals and events.

Additional Information

Personio is an equal opportunities employer and is committed to maintaining an inclusive workplace where people of all backgrounds feel respected and supported. The organization values in-person collaboration while offering flexibility, with two required office days per week in the contracted location. Employees also receive 20 Flex Days per year to work remotely from other locations.

This role is based in Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland, with the option to work from the Munich office as required by the position.