Staff AI Engineer (d/f/m)

Data & Systems
Full Time
Berlin, Munich, Dublin

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 position can be office-based (hybrid) in the following cities: Munich, Berlin, or Dublin.

Personio is on the path to becoming an AI-first company, redesigning how every department operates, and the Internal AI team is leading that transformation from the inside.

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 AI Engineer 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.

Role Responsibilities: What you‘ll do

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 & 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

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

  • 7+ years professional software engineering, with a sustained track record building and maintaining production (AI) systems from ambiguous problem to live, relied-upon product

  • Demonstrated technical leadership: setting standards, shaping architecture across a team, and developing other engineers

  • Experienced writing clean, production-grade Python across distributed systems, REST APIs, and data integration layers; comfortable building functional internal interfaces in React/TypeScript

  • Proven track record building robust internal software with a pragmatic approach to AI: applies it when it's the right answer and plain engineering when it isn't

  • Demonstrated experience owning production quality end-to-end: testing, error handling, observability, and documentation; treats AI-generated code as untrusted input to be hardened before shipping

  • Experienced applying enterprise security patterns as defaults: SSO, OAuth, RBAC, secrets management, data classification, and GDPR — not as afterthoughts

  • Proven experience designing and building agentic systems in production: tool calling, orchestration, sub-agents, memory, and human-in-the-loop, using LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI), agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI or similar), and MCP; comfortable making model selection trade-offs on cost, latency, and quality

  • Proven experience designing and implementing RAG pipelines: retrieval architecture, vector stores, embeddings, and grounding LLM outputs in internal knowledge sources

  • Experienced deploying and operating production services in the cloud (AWS preferred): Docker, serverless, and CI/CD

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

  • 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 follow an office-led, remote friendly approach, including opportunities to work from home and international locations. Many of our teams have designated days for gathering in the office to enhance collaboration and foster a sense of community.

  • 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.

Apply now