Senior Product Security Engineer (d/f/m)

Personio; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive rewards package

28 days vacation

Impact Day

Family leave & sabbatical

Team meals & social events

Job summary

Personio is seeking an experienced Product Security Engineer to embed security into our platform and partner with engineering teams to ensure secure design from the ground up. You will own vulnerability management, influence the security toolchain, and engage with external researchers to drive robust security across products.

You will drive security reviews, mentor engineers, and develop clear security standards and metrics for stakeholders, while promoting a culture of proactive security across

Qualifications

• Experience managing vulnerability programmes and prioritising findings by risk (exploitability, exposure, business impact).
• Ability to define and report metrics to show programme health and drive accountability.
• Knowledge of secure-by-default design, least privilege, robust authentication & authorization, and secure secrets handling.
• Understanding of threat modelling and assessing real-world exploitability and attack paths.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end vulnerability lifecycle, from discovery to remediation tracking and reporting.
• Maintain and evolve security tooling and automation across traditional and AI workflows.
• Respond to security incidents and provide security expertise to internal customers.
• Coordinate penetration tests and manage external researchers and bug bounty scopes.
• Provide design and code reviews to embed security into product development.
• Create and maintain security documentation, policies, and stakeholder metrics.
• Lead security education initiatives and knowledge sharing across engineering.

Skills

Vulnerability management

Security metrics

Threat modelling

Secure-by-default design

Least privilege

Authentication & authorization

Security logging & monitoring

Bias for action

English communication

Job description

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

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.

Security is a priority at Personio.

We're looking for an experienced Product Security Engineer to join our Product & Engineering organization and help us embed security into the core of everything we build. You'll partner directly with engineering teams to ensure our platforms are designed and built securely from the ground up, whether that means conducting in-depth security reviews, introducing security best practices, advising engineers on vulnerability mitigation or building automated tooling that scales protection across our products.

What You´ll Do

• Vulnerability Management Oversight: You own the end-to-end vulnerability lifecycle from discovering vulnerabilities, through its triage to tracking remediation, managing risk acceptances, and reporting on security posture across the organisation.
• Security Tooling & Automation: You maintain and evolve the product security toolchain (traditional and AI workflows), ensuring teams have reliable, well-integrated tools to identify and address security issues within their development environment.
• Participate in Security Operations. You respond to security incidents, provide security expertise for internal customers and use your technical prowess to find and reproduce vulnerabilities or sometimes perform small internal pentests.
• Manage External Partners: You manage collaboration with security vendors and external researchers (Bug Bounty) and coordinate penetration tests, to ensure focus on the right research areas and help set correct scopes for their exercises.
• Security Reviews: You act as a trusted security advisor to engineering teams, providing design reviews, code reviews, and ad-hoc guidance to proactively embed security into product development before issues reach production.
• Security Documentation: You maintain security policies and best-practice guidance ensuring development teams have clear security standards to follow. As well as documentation and metrics for your stakeholders and business leaders.
• Security Education: You drive security awareness across the engineering organisation through the knowledge sharing sessions, and ongoing enablement initiatives that scale security knowledge across engineering.

What You´ll Need

• 5 + years of hands-on experience in product security, offensive security, systems security or equivalent professional education.
• You have a practical experience with vulnerability management programmes or equivalent experience consolidating security issues from different sources and prioritising findings based on real-world risk (e.g., exploitability, exposure, business impact, CVSS/EPSS/KEV).
• You are comfortable defining and reporting vulnerability management programme metrics showing programme health and driving accountability.
• You possess technical expertise of best practices in security engineering, like secure-by-default design, least privilege, robust authentication and authorization patterns, secure secrets handling, safe dependency management, and high-quality security logging and monitoring.
• You have a strong understanding of security vulnerabilities and threat modeling. You are able to assess real-world exploitability and attack paths by reviewing code and technical documentation for security flaws.
• You can guide engineers on remediation methods and strategies across different programming languages and frameworks, earning trust and understanding the balance between security and development experience.
• You have fluent English communication skills (written and verbal) and can effectively translate complex security concepts for executive, technical, and non-technical audiences.
• You take initiative to identify gaps, improve processes, and drive security outcomes rather than waiting for issues to surface, embodying a bias for action approach.
• You can handle ambiguous situations, accurately deciding on relevant information. You can deal with competing priorities, focusing your efforts for maximum security impact.

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 requires 2 days per month in the office and can be based:

Munich/Berlin/Dublin/London/Madrid/Amsterdam.

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 (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.