Principal People Business Partner - Engineering (d/f/m) Personio

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 3 days per week in the office and is based in Munich

Bring your drive. Build our culture. When you join Personio’s People Team, you’re not just impacting the people experience – you’re having a direct influence on the future of HR in organizations across Europe. Come be HR at an HR company, where you’ll be a valued partner every day.

As Principal People Business Partner for Engineering, you’ll be the most senior People Business Partner (PBP) supporting our technical organization – a trusted advisor to CTO and their leadership team on the people strategy that underpins how we build product. You’ll operate at both strategic and hands-on levels: shaping org design and talent strategy at the executive table, while staying close enough to engineering culture and ways of working to be genuinely credible with individual contributors, engineering managers, and staff-level technologists. You’ll also set the standard for the PBP craft – mentoring other PBPs and driving cross-functional People initiatives that scale beyond your own client group.

Role Responsibilities: What you‘ll do

Executive Partnership & Leadership Development

• Act as a strategic advisor and coach to senior Engineering leaders (Director level and above), shaping how they lead through scale, complexity, and change.

• Build the leadership capability of engineering managers and leaders, with particular focus on technical career pathing, span-of-control decisions, and leading distributed/remote engineering teams.

• Represent the People function in Engineering leadership forums, influencing strategic decisions before they reach the wider organization.

Organizational Health

• Own the organizational health agenda for Engineering: attrition (including regretted attrition of senior engineers), spans and layers, engagement, and burnout risk across a technical, always-on function.

• Build predictive, data-driven diagnostics that surface risk early, and design targeted action plans that account for the realities of engineering delivery cycles (releases, on-call, incident load).

Talent & Program Management

• Lead end-to-end talent processes for Engineering – succession planning for critical technical and management roles, calibration, and performance cycles – with fluency in dual-track (management and technical/IC) career frameworks.

• Partner closely with Talent Acquisition on technical hiring strategy, including specialist and senior/staff engineering roles, ensuring hiring bar and process reflect Engineering’s evolving needs.

• Coach on and help resolve complex, senior-level performance and conduct matters within a highly technical, IP-sensitive environment.

Organizational Design & Workforce Planning

• Lead organizational design for Engineering, including major re-organizations, M&A integration, and location/hub strategy for technical talent across multiple jurisdictions.

• Drive workforce planning and skills strategy in partnership with Engineering leadership and Finance, ensuring the org can flex to changing technology, architecture, and delivery priorities.

• Build scalable org frameworks (leveling, career ladders, span-of-control guidelines) that other PBPs can reuse across the business.

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

• 8+ years experience in a People/HR Business Partner role, including significant time partnering directly with Engineering, R&D, or other highly technical organizations in a global, tech-focused environment.

• Proven experience operating at Principal/senior-Business-Partner level, advising VP- or executive-level leaders and influencing organization-wide people strategy, not just a single team.

• Deep fluency in engineering ways of working – agile/scrum delivery, on-call and incident culture, dual-track (management vs. technical/IC) career ladders, and the drivers of engineering attrition and engagement – gained from hands-on partnership with technical teams.

• Track record leading complex organizational design, workforce planning, and change initiatives at scale, ideally including M&A integration or major re-organizations.

• Strong knowledge of HR policy, organizational design, and workforce planning, with the judgment to navigate ambiguity and set precedent rather than follow existing playbooks.

• Data-driven mindset with the ability to build and interpret org health analytics (attrition, spans and layers, engagement) and turn them into board- or exec-ready insight.

• Exceptional communication, stakeholder management, and executive coaching skills, with high emotional intelligence and strong conflict resolution capability.

• A forward-thinking, tech-savvy mindset with genuine curiosity for how AI and automation can improve People products and processes – and credibility to discuss this with engineers.

• Experience mentoring or informally leading other People Business Partners, or otherwise raising the bar for the PBP function, is a strong plus.

• AI Fluency - You have hands-on experience using AI to improve your workflow, and the sound judgment to know exactly when to rely on it and when to step in yourself.

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

• 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