Lead Engineer, Data Platform

The Role: How you'll make an impact at Personio

This position is based in New York City, and in some cases a remote role can be considered for the U.S. East Coast.

At Personio, your work transforms the way millions of people experience work every day. Join our Product & Technology team, where we drive our customers’ outcomes by designing, developing and delivering innovative and high quality products. Be empowered to take ownership of your areas and make an impact on your team, our product, and our customers. 

Our Product Platform domain is fulfilling this purpose by building out the platform strategy for Personio’s product. We are a rapidly growing, enablement-focused domain that strives to create secure, reusable, and extensible systems that accelerate the ability of our internal teams to create customer value, at scale. 

Furthermore, Product Platform plays a pivotal role in delivering the tooling, components, templates and standards that establish the foundations of a common Personio design platform; ultimately providing our customers with a consistent, accessible and delightful experience.

To support our mission, we are looking for a Lead Software Engineer with expertise in data capture, event-driven architecture and tooling, effective data governance, as well as continuously enhancing system reliability and operational excellence. You’ll partner with product and engineering peers across the organization to build a reliable, resilient, scalable and future-proof Personio data platform.

Role Responsibilities: What you'll do

• You will research, engineer and experiment with new ways to improve the developer experience and DevOps practices to provide product teams with the capability to deploy on demand while also limiting any risk to the stability of production.

• Your scope will include everything from how software components are built, tested, deployed, released and monitored across all environments, from the local machine straight through to our production clusters.

• You will foster relationships and work closely with product teams to support them through platform specific migrations. Learn from and understand the challenges they face so that you can translate them into result-oriented solutions that help improve the reliability of the platform. 

• You will also spend time teaching engineers (especially new joiners) how to use our tools, whether by giving internal talks, organizing internal onboarding workshops or writing documentation and tutorials.

• You will conceptualize and own technical solutions end-to-end. Organizing effective groups of engineers to brainstorm, design and deliver impactful work.

• You will help your team manage technical debt, refactor existing solutions, and introduce and improve the team’s approach to principles and processes such as system architecture, design patterns, coding principles and code review.

• You will use your existing experience to help drive the platform forward with new ideas and strategies that help maintain the quality, reliability, security, performance and cost effectiveness of the product and platform.

• You will partner with your engineering manager, keeping them up to date and informed with technical details across multiple projects. Helping to ensure the team is delivering results in an iterative fashion that is driven by impact and promotes a culture of experimentation and learning.

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and designing scalable applications, tools or distributed systems. You understand the needs of software engineers working in product teams, you’ve been in their shoes, and can empathize with them. You want to help your fellow engineers to achieve maximum efficiency.

• Proficiency in Kafka operations or building platform tools that utilize Kafka.

• Experience in both constructing and managing a schema registry, contributing to effective data governance.

• Preferably experience in DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) roles, enhancing our commitment to system reliability and operational excellence.

• Preferably hands-on experience with various database technologies, Debezium and data capture.

• You have a deep understanding and an interest for DevOps tools and technologies such as: Kubernetes, AWS (CDK, ECS, Fargate etc.), Gitlab, DataDog, Sentry, Projen, Backstage, Docker and in particular progress delivery automation (CI/CD pipelines, feature flags, canary deployments, service mesh).

• You’re comfortable designing, building, documenting and distributing robust and delightful solutions in the form of services, CLI tools, scripts & plugins for developers.

• You’re interested in