Staff People Systems Engineer

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike – with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.

About The Role

You will be part of the technical and strategic backbone of our People Technology landscape, helping ensure our systems are aligned, scalable, and genuinely enable how Pleo operates and grows. You’ll translate business needs into thoughtful technical solutions, while continuously improving how our People systems work together across the ecosystem.

This is a hands‑on technical Senior Individual contributor role. You’ll spend a significant portion of your time designing and building integrations, automations, and services yourself, working directly in our stack (HiBob, Ashby, and supporting platforms) and stakeholders. Much of this work involves connecting systems through APIs, webhooks, and event‑driven patterns. Alongside this, you’ll bring structure and direction: shaping architecture, guiding technical decisions, driving change management, and helping prioritise what we build and why.

You’ll work as a close partner to our existing Staff People Tech Engineer, pairing on complex problems, sharing context, and raising the overall bar of the team, leading through collaboration, contribution, context, and technical judgment.

A key part of the role is operating across stakeholders: aligning People Operations, Talent Acquisition, Payroll, Reward, and L&D, bringing clarity to competing needs, and ensuring we prioritise and communicate effectively as we grow.

If you’re excited by owning a domain end‑to‑end, setting direction while staying hands‑on, scaling impact, this team and role is for you.

Who You'll Be Working With And Reporting To

You’ll join the People Tech team, part of Pleo's Internal Technology group (People Tech, Tech Ops, and Finance Systems) and you will report to the Director of Internal Technology while working closely with People Operations and stakeholders across the People area. We’re a collaborative, forward‑thinking team focused on security, scalability, and crafting an exceptional internal experience for every Pleoer.

What You'll Be Doing

• Spend a significant share of your time hands‑on: building integrations, automations, and services across our People Tech stack (HiBob, Ashby, Contractbook and supporting platforms) using APIs, Webhooks, TypeScript in an event‑driven architecture.
• Bring an AI‑native mindset: we've already shipped Harriet and we're looking for someone who actively builds with AI tooling to unlock new capabilities.
• Co‑own and evolve the People Tech roadmap, prioritise competing requests, make deliberate build‑vs‑buy tradeoffs, and clearly communicate what we're doing, what we're not, and why.
• Partner with People Operations, Talent Acquisition, Payroll, Reward, and L&D: gather requirements, translate business needs into well‑scoped technical work, and drive alignment on priorities.
• Automate and improve core employee lifecycle processes including onboarding, off‑boarding, org changes, promotions, compensation updates, contract generation etc.
• Strengthen data quality across People systems: ensure clean flows between HiBob (our source of truth) and downstream consumers, maintain schema‑first standards, and support accurate reporting inputs.
• Own incident response and complex troubleshooting across People systems and integrations, with clear communication and follow‑through on root causes.
• Establish pragmatic engineering standards: documentation, integration patterns, playbooks, test coverage, and change management processes.
• Drive security‑first and GDPR‑compliant approaches to People data, including working with Okta for identity/access and GCP for infrastructure.

For context, our current People systems stack includes Hibob, Ashby, Zinc, Peakon, Abacum, Papaya, Remote.com, Docusign, Contractbook and Sana. Our team is also equipped to work with Claude and have Github access to host their services.

What You Bring

• Many years of experience in People Tech / HRIS engineering, internal tools, solutions engineering, or technical systems roles in a People/HR context.
• Strong hands‑on ability to build reliable integrations and automations between business applications by leveraging APIs, webhooks, scripting, and lightweight custom services.
• Experience with HRIS platforms (ideally HiBob or similar) and comfort operating across a SaaS ecosystem using cloud platforms (G Suite, GCP etc).
• Working knowledge of integrating identity/access tooling (e.g. Okta groups and permissions) into business applications.
• Proven ability to go from ambiguous stakeholder need to scoped solution to shipped result, end‑to‑end.
• Strong system thinking: you can reason about processes at a high level and dive into the technical details.
• Confidence operating autonomously in ambiguous environments with a bias toward action.
• Excellent communication: you explain complex technical decisions clearly, write useful documentation, and keep stakeholders aligned.
• Stakeholder management skills: you build trust, set expectations, and can say 'not now' with clarity when tradeoffs demand it.
• A collaborative, team‑first approach. You're joining a small team and need to be comfortable pairing on problems and building trust quickly.

Why is this role a good fit for you

• You find it easy to translate technical concepts into language that non‑technical stakeholders (from junior to Executive level) can understand.
• You enjoy communicating and collaborating with business stakeholders as much as you enjoy spending time writing scripts, code or configuring systems integrations.
• You are very organised and can plan, manage, coordinate yours and your team’s workload.
• You’re always nerding out about technology and constantly thinking about how you can automate tasks.

This role is not a good fit for you

• Your experience has been focused a lot more on People Operations than technical configuration.
• Most of your experience has been with legacy HR systems in very big corporate settings.
• You require very specific and structured instructions to organise your workload.
• You aren’t able to juggle “getting things done” with “designing for scale”.

Location

Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid or in‑person set‑up in any of the locations listed on the job advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations.

Show Me The Benefits

• Your own Pleo card (no more out‑of‑pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us for your work days – enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office
• Comprehensive private healthcare – depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well‑being support
• Paid parental leave – we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work