Senior Design Engineer, Brand & Creative (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?

This role requires 2 days per week in the office and is based in Munich/Berlin/London.

As a Design Engineer at Personio, you will sit at the intersection of design craft and technical execution, bridging the gap between how we imagine our brand and how it comes to life. You will be a key force in both scaling our brand system into a consistent, well-maintained resource and exploring new, unexpected ways to express our visual identity through code. As an early member of a newly-formalized discipline at Personio, you will help define what great Design Engineering looks like, shaping the path for others who follow.

You will build the components, tooling, and infrastructure that let designers and marketers apply our brand with consistency and ease, while also using code as a creative medium to prototype interactive experiences, motion, and graphics that push our brand beyond what's possible in traditional design tools.

What You’ll Do

• Build internal tools that scale our brand — design and develop the systems, components, and tooling that help teams across Personio apply our brand consistently and efficiently, without sacrificing craft.
• Steward and evolve our brand system for the AI era — maintain high-quality, reusable templates and components, turn our brand system into a machine-readable resource that lets AI tools apply our brand accurately, and build tooling that speeds up repetitive design and production work.
• Explore our visual identity through code — use creative coding, animation, and interactivity to prototype and ship new expressions of our brand that go beyond traditional design tools.
• Spot and close gaps in brand consistency — connect disparate projects across teams and build reusable frameworks that help the brand scale cohesively.
• Collaborate across disciplines — maintain a close relationship with both design and engineering to stay aligned on platform priorities, developer experience, and evolving standards for design-engineering handoff.
• Contribute to our design culture — bring a technical perspective into design conversations and a design perspective into engineering, helping the team think more fluently about code and design together.
• Help define the Design Engineering discipline — partner closely with Design Infrastructure to shape the frameworks, best practices, and standards for Design Engineering at Personio.
• Prototype at the edge of brand and technology — build interactive experiences, generative graphics, and motion-driven concepts that show what our brand can look and feel like.

What You Need To Succeed

• Technical proficiency with front-end development and creative coding, combined with strong visual design sensibility and brand instincts.
• Hands-on experience building brand or design systems, including component libraries, tokens, and templates adopted across multiple teams and touchpoints.
• Comfort with AI-assisted design and prototyping tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Midjourney), and a track record of using these to accelerate creative-to-code workflows. Preference for familiarity with the Claude ecosystem and agentic development workflows.
• Experience creating reusable frameworks, tooling, or processes that help brand scale, and that get adopted beyond their original context.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions — working fluidly with designers, marketers, and engineers, and communicating at the intersection of brand and code.
• An eye for craft and consistency, with the drive to proactively spot brand or quality gaps and take initiative to address them.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, with the self-direction to define your own scope, navigate undefined spaces, and bring clarity to cross-functional challenges.
• Design competency — work can still start in design or animation tools (Figma, After Effects), and design engineers should be familiar with these. Experience with code-connect, plugins, and MCPs is a plus. Candidates with previous design experience will feel especially comfortable in the canvas.

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 days per week 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.

Away 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 (including 24 sessions per year with Oli for yourself and 10 sessions for a significant other), 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.