Staff Engineer, Payroll Foundations (d/f/m)

Staff Engineer, Payroll Foundations (d/f/m)

Product & Tech | Full Time | Munich or London

The Role

This role requires 2 days per week in the office and is based in Munich or London. At Personio, we're on a mission to help millions of people have a better work life. Our People Operating System empowers organisations across Europe to manage HR, payroll, and employee experience in one place.

As a Staff Engineer on the Payroll Foundations team, you'll own the technical direction of the core data storage and serving system that Personio Payroll runs on, the foundation the rest of payroll is built on top of. It's the one place in payroll where the database is pushed to its limits, storing and serving payroll data at volumes and complexity far beyond anywhere else in the domain, while guaranteeing that every record is correct and available when it's needed.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer with genuine depth in high-scale data storage. You'll solve the hardest problems around correctness, reliability and performance in the data layer, write meaningful production code where it matters most, and raise the bar for everyone around you. Your decisions will directly affect thousands of employees being paid correctly every month.

What You'll Do

• Own the data foundation: Set the architecture and patterns for the storage and serving system at the heart of payroll processing, establishing standards other teams build on and adopt.
• Go deep where it counts: Design, optimise and scale a PostgreSQL-based data service that handles far higher load than anywhere else in payroll. This is the place where deep database expertise, not general familiarity, is what makes the difference.
• Solve the hardest problems simply: Find the simplest robust solution to complex challenges around correctness, reliability and performance, staying close to the code.
• Keep money-critical systems trustworthy: Ensure payroll data is stored and served accurately and reliably across the platform, treating correctness as the bar rather than a feature.
• Drive complex initiatives end to end: Lead long-running technical efforts that span team boundaries within payroll, taking accountability for delivery and quality the whole way through.
• Raise operational excellence: Set the standard for the reliability, performance and maintainability of this critical service, keeping it dependable at scale.
• Collaborate across boundaries: Partner closely with the teams that feed data into the service and those that depend on it, and with product managers across payroll, so the system fits coherently into the wider domain.
• Coach and elevate engineers: Mentor engineers through design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and the example you set. The team has strong generalists, and you'll bring the deep data expertise to complement them.