Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Datadog, Kafka (d/f/m)

Personio's intelligent HR platform helps small and medium-sized organizations unlock the power of people by making complicated, time-consuming tasks simple and efficient. Our team of 1,500 Personios is building user-friendly products that delight our 15,000+ customers and their 1.5 million employees. Ready to make an impact from day one?

The Role

This role requires 2 days a week in our Munich, Berlin or Dublin office.

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.

Personio is seeking an experienced Engineer to design, build, operate, monitor and scale our infrastructure through automated solutions. You’ll empower engineering teams by sharing cloud platform expertise, developing tools and establishing company wide mechanisms to ensure reliability, scalability and uptime. Our ideal candidate combines strong technical expertise with a collaborative mindset, working closely with other engineering teams to build, scale and enhance their applications on our platform.

What You’ll Do

• Engage in and improve the full service lifecycle from initial design through deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.

• Prepare services for production by taking part in system design reviews, developing shared frameworks and platforms, planning capacity and conducting launch assessments.

• Operate, monitor, and maintain live services, designing observability stacks and dashboards to track key metrics and improve operational insight.

• Ensure sustainable scalability through automation, actively contributing to continuous improvement for reliability and delivery speed.

• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to define SLOs, error budgets and ensure services are reliable, scalable and observable.

• Support incident management processes, including on-call rotations, assisting with outage response, and contributing to post-mortems and root cause analysis.

• Identify and reduce toil through process automation, creating playbooks and automated runbooks to reduce MTTR.

• Support resilience strategies and help implement chaos testing to proactively uncover weaknesses and validate recovery strategies.

• Own and maintain the reliability of our event streaming and Change Data Capture (CDC) stack.

• Mentor and train peers on reliability best practices and tooling, contributing to community growth.

What You Need To Succeed

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 6+ years of experience with SaaS software development in distributed systems using languages such as Kotlin/Java, Typescript, Python, and technologies like IaC, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• 2+ years’ experience as an SRE or similar role designing, operating, analyzing and troubleshooting distributed systems in agile environments.

• Act as a Datadog subject matter expert, assisting with observability stack design, dashboard creation, and training peers in best practices.

• Hands-on experience running Kafka at scale including configuration, operational failure modes and reliable recovery/runbooks.

• Systematic problem solving and debugging skills with a strong sense of ownership and bias towards establishing mechanisms which can scale across the entire company.

• Excellent written, verbal, and documentation skills.

• Collaborative team player, able to communicate effectively across disciplines.

Nice to Have/Bonus:

• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions/GitOps tools)

• Experience tuning JVM-based services and Node.js runtimes

• Experience with AWS MSK Connect

Why Personio

Personio is an equal opportunities employer, committed to building an integrative culture where everyone feels welcomed and supported. We embrace uniqueness and understand that our diverse, values-driven culture makes us stronger. We are proud to have an inclusive workplace environment that will foster your development no matter your gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, education level, or race.

At Personio, we value in-person collaboration while also offering flexibility. This role is office-based, with 2 required in your contracted office location. The remaining days can be worked from home or in the office if you prefer. In addition, you’ll have 20 Flex Days per year to work remotely from other locations.

Aside from our people, culture, and mission, check out some of the other benefits that make Personio a great place to work:

• 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.