Staff Engineer, Absences (d/f/m)

Product & Tech | Full Time | Berlin, Munich or London

The Role

This role requires 2 days per week in the office and is based in Berlin, Munich or London. Join us to shape the future of software in the underserved and high-impact HR technology industry. Your work will have a direct and tangible impact on customers, offering ownership and the chance to make a meaningful difference. As we prepare for significant growth, you'll face exciting challenges and have the opportunity to influence our path toward becoming one of the world's leading tech companies.

As a Staff Engineer in the Absences team, part of Personio's Time area, you will set the technical direction for the systems that power how organisations across Europe manage leave and absence. Time sits at the heart of Personio, and absence data flows directly into payroll, so the work is both high stakes and deeply interconnected. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who can anchor complex, long-running initiatives across teams, find the simplest path through genuine regulatory complexity, and raise the bar for everyone around them.

What You'll Do

• Set technical direction: Define the architecture and patterns for the absence management systems, covering accruals, entitlements, and complex real-world cases, setting standards that other teams adopt rather than mandate.
• Solve the hardest problems simply: Find the simplest robust solution to complex domain and regulatory challenges, writing meaningful amounts of production code yourself where it matters most.
• Drive complex initiatives end to end: Lead long-running technical efforts that span team boundaries, taking accountability for delivery and quality the whole way through.
• Model regulatory complexity cleanly: Tackle rules that vary significantly by market and company, from mandatory tracking in Germany and Spain to differing break, overtime, and entitlement logic, and design architecture that hides that complexity rather than spreading it.
• Keep money-critical data trustworthy: Ensure absence data feeds accurately into pay calculations, treating correctness, reliability, and explainability as the bar across the systems you shape.
• Raise operational excellence: Set the standard for how services are deployed, observed, and maintained, keeping critical flows dependable at scale and deliberately reducing complexity.
• Coach and elevate engineers: Mentor senior engineers through design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and the example you set, raising the technical bar across the team and beyond.