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Engineering Manager – Developer Experience, Java/Kotlin

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full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Munich • Germany

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Tech Stack

Distributed SystemsJavaKafkaKotlin

About the role

  • Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers working on backend foundations and developer experience.
  • Build an inclusive, high-performance culture where engineers take ownership and continuously improve how Personio builds software.
  • Support career development, feedback cycles, and healthy delivery practices.
  • 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.
  • Ability to balance long-term foundations work with short-term developer needs and iterative delivery.
  • Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product domains, and leadership.
  • Ability to drive standards through partnership and influence—not just enforcement.
  • Experience building or operating shared frameworks/libraries used by multiple teams.
  • Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) and common messaging patterns.
  • Experience owning internal APIs/SDKs and managing versioning/backward compatibility.
  • 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.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
JavaKotlinAPI designdistributed systemsperformance analysisscalabilityevent-driven architectureKafkabackend systemssoftware engineering
Soft Skills
leadershipcoachingcommunicationstakeholder managementprioritizationteam buildingcollaborationproblem-solvingfeedback facilitationinfluence