Staff Software Engineer - AI

Data, Systems & AI
Full Time
Berlin, Munich, Dublin
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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 per week in the office and is based in 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 Software Engineer - 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.

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, 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

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

  • 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)

Nice to have

  • React/TypeScript for internal interfaces

  • Kotlin (Python is our main backend language; Kotlin is a plus)

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