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 adopti