Staff Engineer, Documents (d/f/m)

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, Documents

Product & Tech | Full Time | London or Dublin

The Role

This role requires 2 days per week in the office and is based in London or Dublin, where the team is located. Join us to shape the future of software in the underserved and high-impact HR technology industry. Your work will have a direct and tangible impact on customers, offering ownership and the chance to make a meaningful difference. As we prepare for significant growth, you'll face exciting challenges and have the opportunity to influence our path toward becoming one of the world's leading tech companies.

As a Staff Engineer in the Documents team, you will set the technical direction for the systems that store, generate, and manage employee documents across Personio. Documents is a foundational part of the platform: it is where customers keep the records that matter most, and where accuracy, security, and reliability are non‑negotiable. The team also owns Personio's e‑Signatures product, working closely with Docusign as our third‑party provider, so you will own the technical partnership and integration that make signing seamless and dependable. This is a deeply technical, hands‑on role for an engineer who can anchor backend initiatives that span teams and raise the bar for everyone around them.

What You’ll Do

• Set technical direction: Define the architecture and patterns for the documents platform that handles storage, generation, templating, and lifecycle management, setting standards that other teams adopt.
• Own the e‑Signatures integration: Lead the technical partnership with Docusign, evolving the e‑Signatures product and the integration behind it so signing is reliable, secure, and seamless for customers.
• Solve the hardest problems simply: Find the simplest robust solution to complex challenges around document generation, versioning, and secure access at scale, writing meaningful amounts of production code yourself.
• Drive complex initiatives end to end: Lead large backend initiatives such as evolving how documents are generated and stored, and modernising the underlying systems, taking accountability for delivery and quality the whole way through.
• Work across boundaries: Partner with engineers, product managers, and designers across EO and beyond, bringing services together so document capabilities are adopted consistently rather than shipped in isolation.
• Raise operational excellence: Improve how the team deploys, observes, and maintains services, keeping systems that handle sensitive customer data reliable and reducing complexity as the platform scales.
• Coach and elevate engineers: Mentor senior and lead engineers through design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and the example you set.

What You Need To Succeed

• Backend and distributed systems expertise: A strong track record architecting and delivering complex backend systems in production, ideally involving data storage, document processing, or systems where correctness and durability are critical.
• Third‑party integration experience: Comfort designing and owning integrations with external providers, managing the contracts and reliability concerns that come with depending on a partner system.
• Systems‑level thinking: The ability to see how separate services and teams fit into one coherent whole, and to design the contracts between them.
• Architectural judgement with a bias for simplicity: Strong instincts for choosing the most reliable and efficient solution rather than the most complex one, especially where accuracy and data integrity matter.
• Hands‑on delivery: Comfort staying close to the code and contributing significant production work while also setting direction for others.
• Cross‑team technical leadership: Experience anchoring long‑running initiatives that span multiple teams, from direction‑setting through to a shipped, dependable result.
• Operational excellence: Solid instincts for CI/CD, observability, and keeping critical services reliable in production, plus a history of raising standards and supporting the growth of the engineers around you. Familiarity with JVM languages such as Java or Kotlin is helpful, but not mandatory.

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