Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• 7+ years building and shipping production software
• Technical leadership: you set engineering standards and shape architecture across a team
• Expert Python skills — our primary backend language — across distributed systems, APIs, and data integration
• Deep hands-on experience building production AI products: agentic workflows and RAG pipelines with LLM APIs, agent frameworks (e.g. LangGraph), and MCP
• Judgement about where AI adds value and where it's overkill
• A track record of production-grade work at scale: testing, observability, documentation, and secure handling of auth and data (SSO, OAuth, RBAC, GDPR)
• Experience deploying and operating services in the cloud (AWS, Docker, CI/CD)
• React/TypeScript for internal interfaces
• Kotlin (Python is our main backend language; Kotlin is a plus)

What the job involves

• The Internal AI team works as a product team for Personio's own operations: embedding directly in business functions, building the agents, tools & automations that make change real, and staying accountable for outcomes
• At the core of that mission is Personio's internal AI operating system: the layer of agents, automations, and tools each function runs on
• The Staff Software Engineer (d/f/m) - Internal AI is the technical anchor of that mission
• You take on the most complex, ambiguous problems on the roadmap — the ones without a clear playbook — and set the technical standard the rest of the team works to
• You work across the full scope of the Internal AI team, not just within a single domain, and your influence extends beyond it: shaping how AI engineering is done across Personio, contributing to the direction of shared platform and infrastructure, and growing the engineers around you
• This role sits where deep software engineering, applied AI, and technical leadership converge
• Tackle the hardest problems
• Own the most complex, ambiguous internal products and tools end-to-end — the ones that define what's possible for the team and the organisation
• Make the architecture calls where the stakes are highest: navigate ambiguity, manage risk, and set a direction others can build on
• Establish the bar for what production-grade internal tooling, automations, and AI looks like at Personio, across the full stack from system design to deployment
• Productionise and maintain
• Define what "done" means for internal products at Personio — auth, error handling, monitoring, rollback, documentation — and hold the team to that bar
• Own critical systems over their full lifetime; ensure quality, reliability, and continuity even as the team and the technology evolve
• Shape the AI platform
• Work closely with the AI Platform team to shape the direction of shared infrastructure: contribute production experience back into the platform, surface requirements from the hardest use cases, and help define what the platform needs to enable
• Ensure the patterns and standards you set for your own work are reflected in shared platform capabilities
• Technical leadership
• Set the technical direction for the Internal AI engineering team: define standards, review architecture decisions, and raise the quality of what gets shipped across the team
• Actively develop other engineers — through code review, pairing, design feedback, and helping them build the judgment to work independently at higher complexity
• Represent the Internal AI team's technical perspective in cross-functional discussions, bringing clarity on what AI can and can't do and how engineering constraints should shape roadmap decisions

Benefits

• 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 (because we love what we do, but we also love vacation!)
• Make an impact on the environment and society with Impact Days
• Receive generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities with PersonioCares
• Connect with your fellow Personios at regular company and team events like All Company Culture Week and local year-end celebrations
• Engage in a high-impact working environment with flat hierarchies and short decision-making processes
• Find your best way to work with our office-led, and remote-friendly PersonioFlex!