Hybrid Engineering Manager – Developer Experience, Java/Kotlin

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• Job title: Engineering Manager – Developer Experience, Java/Kotlin
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Distributed Systems, Java, Kafka, Kotlin
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Munich, Germany

About the role

• Engineering Manager at Personio, leading backend development teams to enhance HR technology solutions. Focus on building foundational components and improving service efficiencies in Munich office.

Responsibilities

• Join us to shape the future of software in the underserved and high-impact HR technology industry.
• Lead a team building the foundational backend building blocks that enable product teams to ship services faster and more safely.
• Work on the paved road for backend development: API contracts, service-to-service communication, reliability and performance under the hood, and reusable components that teams can adopt confidently at scale.
• Drive the roadmap for inter-service communication: how services discover each other, exchange data, evolve APIs, and remain compatible over time.
• Partner with product-domain teams to understand pain points and deliver reusable building blocks that reduce cognitive load and prevent repeated reinvention.
• Define and promote standards for API design, versioning, backward compatibility, error handling, and resilience patterns.
• Lead initiatives across frameworks, shared libraries, SDKs, and low-level components (e.g., eventing foundations such as Kafka-based patterns, communication abstractions, common middleware).
• Ensure that internal components are well-designed, well-documented, and easy to adopt, with clear ownership and support boundaries.
• Encourage a strong engineering discipline around testing, release processes, dependency management, and long-term maintainability for shared components.
• Guide the team to go deep: profiling, performance analysis, debugging production issues, and improving latency/throughput where it matters.
• Establish meaningful success metrics (e.g., adoption, reduced integration time, fewer incidents caused by communication issues, improved reliability of shared components).
• Facilitate architecture discussions and technical decisions with senior ICs, keeping solutions pragmatic and scalable.
• Work closely with engineering leaders and partner teams to align on priorities and manage dependencies across many services.
• Communicate progress and trade-offs clearly, and drive alignment on standards without slowing down product delivery.
• Collaborate with adjacent DX areas (platform infrastructure, DevOps tooling, AI tooling) where relevant—while keeping the team primarily focused on backend foundations.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading engineers as a people manager (typically 2+ years), including coaching, performance support, hiring, and building healthy team practices.
• Ability to set direction, prioritize effectively, and deliver outcomes in an environment with multiple stakeholders and competing needs.
• Strong software engineering experience (typically 5+ years) building production backend systems.
• Required: previous hands-on professional experience in Java as an engineer (building and shipping backend services/components).
• Strong plus: hands-on experience with Kotlin (or strong interest in working in Kotlin-heavy codebases).
• Comfortable engaging deeply in code and technical design discussions, particularly in areas like:
• - service-to-service communication patterns (synchronous and asynchronous)
• - API design and evolution
• - distributed systems fundamentals (reliability, consistency, failure modes)
• - performance and scalability considerations.
• Motivation to build internal products that other engineers love to use: you care about usability, documentation, adoption, and feedback loops.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product domains, and leadership.
• Ability to drive standards through partnership and influence—not just enforcement.
• Nice to Have: Experience building or operating shared frameworks/libraries used by multiple teams.
• Nice to Have: Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) and common messaging patterns.
• Nice to Have: Experience owning internal APIs/SDKs and managing versioning/backward compatibility.
• Nice to Have: Familiarity with observability and performance tooling (profilers, tracing, metrics) for backend systems.

Benefits

• Receive a competitive reward package – reevaluated each year – that includes salary, benefits, and pre-IPO equity
• Enjoy 28 days of paid vacation, plus an additional day after 2 and 4 years
• Make an impact on the environment and society with 1 (fully paid) Impact Day
• Receive generous family leave, child support, mental health support, and sabbatical opportunities
• We enjoy gathering for meals, cultural initiatives, and events like local Summer Sessions and year-end celebrations. There's also healthy snacks, drinks, and a weekly catered lunch.