Staff Engineer, Payroll Foundations (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?

Staff Engineer, Payroll Foundations (d/f/m)

Product & Tech | Full Time | Munich or London

The Role

This role requires 2 days per week in the office and is based in Munich or London. At Personio, we're on a mission to help millions of people have a better work life. Our People Operating System empowers organisations across Europe to manage HR, payroll, and employee experience in one place.

 

As a Staff Engineer on the Payroll Foundations team, you'll own the technical direction of the core data storage and serving system that Personio Payroll runs on, the foundation the rest of payroll is built on top of. It's the one place in payroll where the database is pushed to its limits, storing and serving payroll data at volumes and complexity far beyond anywhere else in the domain, while guaranteeing that every record is correct and available when it's needed.

 

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer with genuine depth in high-scale data storage. You'll solve the hardest problems around correctness, reliability and performance in the data layer, write meaningful production code where it matters most, and raise the bar for everyone around you. Your decisions will directly affect thousands of employees being paid correctly every month.

What You'll Do

• Own the data foundation: Set the architecture and patterns for the storage and serving system at the heart of payroll processing, establishing standards other teams build on and adopt.

• Go deep where it counts: Design, optimise and scale a PostgreSQL-based data service that handles far higher load than anywhere else in payroll. This is the place where deep database expertise, not general familiarity, is what makes the difference.

• Solve the hardest problems simply: Find the simplest robust solution to complex challenges around correctness, reliability and performance, staying close to the code.

• Keep money-critical systems trustworthy: Ensure payroll data is stored and served accurately and reliably across the platform, treating correctness as the bar rather than a feature.

• Drive complex initiatives end to end: Lead long-running technical efforts that span team boundaries within payroll, taking accountability for delivery and quality the whole way through.

• Raise operational excellence: Set the standard for the reliability, performance and maintainability of this critical service, keeping it dependable at scale.

• Collaborate across boundaries: Partner closely with the teams that feed data into the service and those that depend on it, and with product managers across payroll, so the system fits coherently into the wider domain.

• Coach and elevate engineers: Mentor engineers through design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and the example you set. The team has strong generalists, and you'll bring the deep data expertise to complement them.

What You Need to Succeed

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise (essential): A genuine track record of designing, optimising and scaling PostgreSQL for high-throughput storage and serving, with the kind of depth that can take the database further than a generalist can when problems get hard. This is the one non-negotiable for the role.

• Data-store service experience: Experience building data storage and serving systems as a core responsibility: not just using a database behind an application, but building the store itself.

• Correctness-critical experience: Demonstrated experience designing reliable services with high correctness requirements, where accuracy is non-negotiable.

• Strong programming foundations: Deep experience in languages such as Kotlin, Java or similar, and comfort contributing significant production code while setting direction for others.

• Architectural judgement with a bias for simplicity: Strong instincts for the most reliable and efficient solution rather than the most elaborate one.

• A systems-and-people perspective: The ability to connect the data layer to the wider picture, understanding the teams that send and consume the data and the business goals the system serves, rather than staying purely at the low level.

• Cross-team technical leadership: A track record of anchoring long-running initiatives across multiple teams, from direction-setting through to a shipped, dependable result, and of raising the standards of the engineers around you.

• 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.

Nice to have

• Experience with temporal or history-tracking data models (systems that record what was true, and what was known, at different points in time).

• Operational ownership of critical infrastructure in an SRE or SRE-like capacity, accountable for correctness, availability and performance.

• Background in fintech, payroll or another regulated, financially sensitive domain where accuracy and compliance are critical.

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.

 

At Personio, we value in-person collaboration while also offering flexibility. This role is office-based, with 2 days per week required in your contracted office location. The remaining days can be worked from home or in the office if you prefer, plus 20 Flex Days per year to work remotely from other locations.

 

In addition, you'll benefit from:

 

• A competitive reward package including salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity

• 28 days of paid vacation, plus additional days after 2 and 4 years

• One fully paid Impact Day per year

• Generous family leave, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities

• Regular team events, healthy office snacks, drinks, and weekly catered lunches