Staff People Scientist (d/f/m) in London

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.

The Opportunity

We are building something genuinely rare: a People Intelligence function that treats Personio itself as customer zero. This Principal Data Scientist role sits at the intersection of applied data science and people strategy responsible for designing and deploying the models, frameworks, and insight systems that shape how we understand our workforce. You will shape the analytical capability within the People Systems & Insights team, partnering closely with People Partners, Reward, Talent Acquisition, and senior leadership to move people decision-making from intuition to evidence. This is not a reporting role. It is a modelling, experimentation, and intelligence role with a clear path toward the commercialisation of people analytics as a Personio product capability.

What You'll Do

• Build the People Intelligence Foundation
  • Design and own the strategy and measurement framework for disciplined people analytics within Personio.
  • Help build and curate the canonical metrics, entity relationships and semantics layers that unlock valuable and scalable people analytics.
  • Partner with Data Engineering to ensure clean, documented, test-covered pipelines with industry grade tooling like DBT and Snowflake, Personio HRIS, compensation systems, engagement tools, and ATS data.
  • Establish data quality standards and monitoring for people data, with a clear escalation path for anomalies.
• Deliver Predictive and Explanatory Models
  • Build and iterate on predictive models across core people domains: attrition risk, time-to-productivity, compensation equity, engagement drivers, and workforce planning scenarios.
  • Develop explanatory frameworks that help non-technical stakeholders understand what is happening, why, and what levers exist not just dashboards, but genuine analytical narratives.
  • Leverage causal inference, A/B testing (where applicable) and natural experiments to evaluate policy interventions, onboarding changes with statistical rigor.
• Architect the Multi-Agent Intelligence Layer
  • Collaborate on the design of Personio's People Agent architecture a multi-agent system with specialist sub-agents aligned to Talent, Engagement, Reward, and Manager insight pillars.
  • Define the analytical outputs and signal feeds that each sub-agent draws upon, ensuring model outputs are actionable, explainable, and governed.
  • Work with the P-Tech engineering partner to productionise models and integrate them into agent workflows.
• Stakeholder Partnership & Communication
  • Act as the senior analytical voice in conversations with Execs and functional VPs, translating complex model outputs into decisions and recommendations.
  • Run structured insight discovery sessions with People Partners and People Operations to surface the highest-value analytical problems worth solving.
  • Contribute to Personio's external thought leadership on people analytics, including customer-facing events and published frameworks.
• Raise the Bar on Craft & Standards
  • Define and own the analytical standards for the People Systems & Insights team, code quality, reproducibility, documentation, and model governance.
  • Mentor junior analysts and data engineers on people data modelling, causal inference, and applied ML best practices.
  • Champion responsible use of people data: privacy-preserving methods, bias auditing, and transparent model communication.

Essential What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of experience in data science, applied ML, or quantitative research with at least 3 years focused on people, workforce, or behavioural data.
• Deep expertise in causal inference, survival analysis, and predictive modelling and the judgment to know when a simpler method is the right one.
• Strong command of Python (pandas, scikit-learn, statsmodels) and SQL; comfortable with dbt and modern data stack tooling.
• Track record of translating model outputs into business decisions, you know how to get findings acted on, not just published.
• Experience designing data models and semantic layers, not just consuming them.
• Excellent communication skills: you can explain a Kaplan-Meier curve to a CFO without losing the rigour.

Highly Valued

• A degree (master's or PhD) in I-O psychology, organizational behavior, or a closely related field.
• Experience in HR tech, people analytics platforms, or workforce intelligence products.
• Familiarity with LLM-based agent systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation in an analytical context.
• Exposure to privacy-preserving techniques (differential privacy, k-anonymity) applied to sensitive HR data.
• Published work, conference talks, or open-source contributions in people analytics or applied behavioural data science.
• Experience commercialising internal analytics capabilities turning internal tools into product features.

How We Work

The People Systems & Insights team follows a clear sequencing philosophy: data foundation first, analytics second, predictive intelligence third. You will join at the moment we transition from foundation-building to full analytical build-out. The team includes HRIS Managers, a Data Analyst, and an embedded P-Tech engineer. You will be the first dedicated Data Scientist in the people domain. We work closely with Personio Analytics (our BI platform), Snowflake, and a growing suite of AI tooling. We iterate fast, document thoroughly, and hold ourselves to the same standards we'd expect from a product team shipping to customers — because increasingly, we are.

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.

Apart 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 Impact Day per year.
• 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.