The Role

How you'll make an impact at Personio

As Senior Engagement Manager for Professional Services, you will lead the DACH pre-sales services motion — working directly with Sales, prospects and customers to define the right implementation approach before contract signature. This means understanding requirements, recommending the appropriate services package, defining scope, estimating effort, and ensuring that what we sell can be delivered successfully.

This is a hands-on role: you'll personally lead complex scoping conversations, support customer calls, shape Statements of Work, and coordinate specialist input from Professional Services Team Leads and delivery experts where deeper product or implementation knowledge is needed. Beyond live deal support, you'll also help scale the model — identifying recurring questions, defining standard scoping approaches, and improving the guidance available to Sales, in partnership with a PS Operations Manager who owns intake workflow, reporting, enablement coordination and self-service infrastructure.

Success means giving Sales fast, credible, commercially sound support on complex opportunities, while reducing unnecessary dependency on Professional Services for standard scenarios.

Role Responsibilities: What you'll do

• Own end-to-end pre-sales engagement: Lead complex Professional Services requests, discovery/scoping workshops, and customer calls for DACH Sales, translating requirements into a clear, commercially credible and operationally deliverable implementation approach.
• Scope and package definition: Recommend the right services package, delivery model and support level; define scope, assumptions, exclusions, timelines, effort, and delivery roles for each engagement.
• SOW ownership: Draft, review and approve Statements of Work for complex/non-standard engagements, and help Sales articulate delivery model, approach and expected customer responsibilities.
• Primary PS-Sales partner: Act as the go-to Professional Services contact for qualified pre-sales opportunities—supporting complex questions, services positioning, implementation objections, proposal shaping and deal structuring; run regular deal clinics/office hours.
• Non-standard requests and judgement calls: Advise on package exceptions and bespoke requirements, giving clear recommendations on what PS can support, what needs adjustment, and what shouldn't be committed to.
• Delivery readiness and risk management: Ensure sold scope is clear, complete and aligned to delivery capability; identify risks/dependencies/capability gaps pre-signature; coordinate Team Leads and specialists to consolidate a single recommendation; ensure documented handover to delivery; review post-sale issues to strengthen the pre-sale process.
• Commercial estimating and guardrails: Estimate effort, duration and role mix; apply pricing, packaging and margin guardrails; support discount/commercial exceptions within authority levels; escalate material risks to PS leadership.
• Cross-functional balance: Balance customer needs against standardization, delivery capacity and long-term success, partnering with Finance, Operations and PS leadership on approvals or exceptions.
• Scalable enablement: Spot recurring scoping patterns and turn them into standard guidance—defining content for playbooks, decision trees, templates and effort calculators with PS Operations; coach Sales on packaging, qualification, discovery and scoping.
• Continuous improvement: Define where Sales can self-serve vs. needing Engagement Manager support, and use deal/request data to recommend and prioritize improvements to packages, guardrails and the pre-sales operating model.