Staff Software Engineer - Reliability (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
Hiring locations are Munich, Berlin, Dublin, and Remote (Germany, Ireland).
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.
Personio is looking for an experienced staff software engineer to join our central Reliability team. This is a software engineering role where you'll design and build the platforms, libraries and automated systems that engineering teams across Personio rely on to run their services
You'll set the technical and strategic direction for reliability across Personio's engineering organization, ensuring systems stay simple, scalable and available. Day to day, this involves guiding teams, sharing cloud platform expertise and building the tools, guardrails and reporting that surface failure modes early. You’ll lead as much by doing as by advising.
What You’ll Do
Design and build the platforms and automated tooling, including AI-assisted agents, that enable engineering teams to scale their infrastructure on demand and embed reliability practices directly into how they work
Engage in and improve the full service lifecycle from initial design and inception through to deployment, operation, continuous improvement and conducting launch assessments
Operating critical services, leading incident response for the hardest problems, and turning what you learn into standards and tooling for the wider organization
Design and implement observability stacks and dashboards (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch) to improve operational insight across logs, metrics, traces and alerts
Establish resilience strategies to proactively uncover weaknesses and validate recovery strategies
Collaborate with product and engineering teams to define SLOs and error budgets to ensure services are reliable, scalable and observable
Identify and eliminate toil across engineering, building the automation, playbooks and runbooks that reduce MTTR and become the patterns other teams adopt
Partner on security posture and compliance metric reviews related to operational reliability
Grow reliability expertise across engineering
What You Need To Succeed
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field or equivalent practical experience
8+ years of experience with SaaS software development in distributed systems using languages such as Kotlin/Java, Typescript, Python and technologies like IaC, Docker and Kubernetes
4+ years’ experience designing, operating and analyzing large-scale troubleshooting distributed systems
Good knowledge of modern application/infrastructure monitoring concepts (Datadog experience advantageous)
Experience reducing on-call toil for engineers by automating repetitive operational work, tuning alerts to improve signal-to-noise or building self-healing mechanisms
Systematic problem solving and debugging skills, coupled with a strong sense of ownership
Track record of driving technical initiatives across multiple teams and influencing engineering direction
Excellent written and documentation skills
Collaborative team player, able to communicate effectively across disciplines
Nice to Have/Bonus:
Experience with Kafka/Debezium Connectors
Experience operating SQL Databases at scale
Experience tuning JVM-based services and Node.js runtimes
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 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.

Work arrangement
No