Lead Engineer, Payroll

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 growing team of 1,800+ Personios across Europe and the US are building user-friendly products that delight our 14,000+ customers and their 1.5 million employees. Ready to make an impact from day one?
The Role: How you'll make an impact at Personio
This is a hybrid position with time split between office-based and remote working from Germany (Munich).
At Personio, we value the flexibility that our hybrid set-up offers, but equally value in-person time to drive connection, community, and collaboration.
At Personio, your work transforms the way millions of people experience work every day. Join our Product & Technology team, where we drive customer outcomes by designing, developing, and delivering innovative, high-quality products. Be empowered to take ownership of your areas and make a real impact on your team, our product, and our customers.
As a Lead Engineer in our Payroll team, you will play a key role in shaping the technical vision and execution of a critical area of our product. You will lead the team in improving existing features, building new capabilities, and solving complex challenges. By setting the technical direction, mentoring engineers, and ensuring operational excellence, you will enable your team to deliver scalable, high-quality solutions. Our Payroll domain is a high-impact area, helping businesses streamline their payroll processes, ensuring compliance, and delivering a seamless experience for our users.
Role Responsibilities: What you'll do

• Lead High-Impact Projects: Drive the design, development, and delivery of critical Payroll features and improvements, ensuring high performance, security, and scalability.
• Hands-On Development: Engage in high-output coding, architectural decision-making, and technical problem-solving to ensure quality and efficiency.
• System Design and Architecture: Define and implement robust, scalable architectures for Payroll solutions, collaborating with cross-functional teams to align technical decisions with business goals.
• Technical Strategy & Planning: Take ownership of project scoping, estimation, and execution, working closely with product management and leadership to align engineering efforts with company priorities.
• Mentorship & Team Development: Coach and mentor engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and innovation.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure reliability, observability, and maintainability of payroll services by implementing best practices in monitoring, incident response, and testing.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders to create seamless Payroll solutions that drive customer satisfaction.
• Innovation & Problem-Solving: Tackle complex technical challenges, advocate for best practices, and drive innovation within the team and the broader engineering organization.

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

• Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in Kotlin or Java preferred, with additional experience in backend languages such as Golang, Python, or Scala being a plus.
• Leadership Experience: Proven ability to lead and mentor engineering teams, driving technical excellence and fostering professional growth.
• Operational Excellence: Expertise in building and maintaining high-availability, high-performance systems, with a deep understanding of testing strategies, monitoring, and security best practices.
• Strategic Thinking: Experience defining and executing technical strategies that align with business goals and customer needs.
• Collaboration & Communication: Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and drive alignment across teams.
• Problem-Solving Mindset: Ability to navigate complex technical and business challenges, proposing innovative solutions that drive impact.

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.
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 (because we love what we do, but we also love vacation!).
• Make an impact on the environment and society with 2 (fully paid) Impact Days - one for an individual project of your choice and one for a company-wide initiative.
• Receive generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities with PersonioCares.
• Find your best way to work with our office-led, remote-friendly PersonioFlex! Most teams offer a roughly 50% remote, 50% in-office working framework.
• 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.