Staff People Systems Engineer

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved not just finance. At Pleo were changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless empowering and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses go beyond.

The word Pleo actually means more than youd expect and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now were at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40000 customers our business and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs who turn complex problems into simple solutions challenge the way things are done (respectfully) and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward we cant say weve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly thats half the fun! What we can say is that were a driven progressive and importantly a kind bunch of 850 people from over 100 nationalities all committed to delivering the future of business spending together.

About the role

You will be part of the technical and strategic backbone of our People Technology landscape helping ensure our systems are aligned scalable and genuinely enable how Pleo operates and grows. Youll translate business needs into thoughtful technical solutions while continuously improving how our People systems work together across the ecosystem.

This is a hands-on technical Senior Individual contributor role. Youll spend a significant portion of your time designing and building integrations automations and services yourself working directly in our stack (HiBob Ashby and supporting platforms) and stakeholders. Much of this work involves connecting systems through APIs webhooks and event-driven patterns. Alongside this youll bring structure and direction: shaping architecture guiding technical decisions driving change management and helping prioritise what we build and why.

Youll work as a close partner to our existing Staff People Tech Engineer pairing on complex problems sharing context and raising the overall bar of the team leading through collaboration contribution context and technical judgment.

A key part of the role is operating across stakeholders: aligning People Operations Talent Acquisition Payroll Reward and L&D bringing clarity to competing needs and ensuring we prioritise and communicate effectively as we grow.

If youre excited by owning a domain end-to-end setting direction while staying hands-on scaling impact this team and role is for you.

Who youll be working with and reporting to

Youll join the People Tech team part of Pleos Internal Technology group (People Tech Tech Ops and Finance Systems) and you will report to the Director of Internal Technology while working closely with People Operations and stakeholders across the People area.

Were a collaborative forward-thinking team focused on security scalability and crafting an exceptional internal experience for every Pleoer.

What youll be doing

As a Staff People Systems Engineering you will:

• Spend a significant share of your time hands-on: building integrations automations and services across our People Tech stack (HiBob Ashby Contractbook and supporting platforms) using APIs Webhooks TypeScript in an event-driven architecture.

• Bring an AI-native mindset: weve already shipped Harriet and were looking for someone who actively builds with AI tooling to unlock new capabilities

• Co-own and evolve the People Tech roadmap prioritise competing requests make deliberate build-vs-buy tradeoffs and clearly communicate what were doing what were not and why

• Partner with People Operations Talent Acquisition Payroll Reward and L&D: gather requirements translate business needs into well-scoped technical work and drive alignment on priorities. Of course you will also be very good friends with Engineering and Data functions.

• Automate and improve core employee lifecycle processes including onboarding offboarding org changes promotions compensation updatescontract generation etc.

• Strengthen data quality across People systems: ensure clean flows between HiBob (our source of truth) and downstream consumers maintain schema-first standards and support accurate reporting inputs

• Own incident response and complex troubleshooting across People systems and integrations with clear communication and follow-through on root causes

• Establish pragmatic engineering standards: documentation integration patterns playbooks test coverage and change management processes

• Drive security-first and GDPR-compliant approaches to People data including working with Okta for identity/access and GCP for infrastructure

For context our current People systems stack includes Hibob Ashby Zinc Peakon Abacum Papaya Docusign Contractbook and Sana. Our team is also equipped to work with Claude and have Github access to host their services.

What you bring

• Many years of experience in People Tech / HRIS engineering internal tools solutions engineering or technical systems roles in a People/HR context.

• Strong hands-on ability to build reliable integrations and automations between business applications by leveraging APIs webhooks scripting and lightweight custom services.

• Experience with HRIS platforms (ideally HiBob or similar) and comfort operating across a SaaS ecosystem using cloud platforms (GSuite GCP etc)

• Working knowledge of integrating identity/access tooling (e.g. Okta groups and permissions) into business applications.

• Proven ability to go from ambiguous stakeholder need to scoped solution to shipped result end-to-end

• Strong system thinking: you can reason about processes at a high level and dive into the technical details

• Confidence operating autonomously in ambiguous environments with a bias toward action

• Excellent communication: you explain complex technical decisions clearly write useful documentation and keep stakeholders aligned

• Stakeholder management skills: you build trust set expectations and can say not now with clarity when tradeoffs demand it

• A collaborative team-first approach. Youre joining a small team and need to be comfortable pairing on problems and building trust quickly

Why is this role a good fit for you

This role is a good fit for you if:

• You find it easy to translate technical concepts into language that non-technical stakeholders (from junior to Executive level) can understand. A key part of this role is about explaining systems capabilities limitations and requirements to scope and implement working solutions for People colleagues.

• You enjoy communicating and collaborating with business stakeholders as much as you enjoy spending time writing scripts code or configuring systems integrations.

• You are very organised and can plan manage coordinate yours and your teams workload. You can autonomously divide and assign tasks and you other words you can act as a Project Manager for your team.

• Youre always nerding out about technology and constantly thinking about how you can automate other words writing scripts building agents or custom services (with the help of Claude!) are things youve had previous experience doing.
  

This role is not a good fit for you if:

• Your experience has been focused a lot more on People Operations than technical configuration. You will be expected to read technical documentation to understand and assess API capabilities while also configuring webhooks feeds.

• Most of your experience has been with legacy HR systems in very big corporate settings. Were working with a modern People tech stack. This is not a role for an SAP/Workday specialist.

• You require very specific and structured instructions to organise your workload. You will have a lot of autonomy in this role and will be expected to plan work for rather big workstreams balancing day-to-day operations with project work.

• You arent able to juggle getting things done with designing for scale. This role requires you to find the right balance between ensuring delivery and configuring/documenting for long-term efficiency.

The location

Please note: We can hire on a remote hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the job advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations.

Show me the benefits

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)

• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office

• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location coverage options include Vitality Alan or Médis

• We offer 25 days of holiday your public holidays

• For our Team we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options

• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice

• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far

• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that were supportive of families and help you feel that you dont have to compromise your family due to work

The interview process

We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful our interview process is as follows:

1. Intro call: a 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background.

2. Hiring Manager interview: a 45-60mins experience-based conversation to assess your background and experience fit.

3. Pleo challenge interview: a 60mins live case study interview with two colleagues to deep dive into job specific skills.

4. Final interview: a 30-45mins interview with a senior leader covering values and behavioural skills.

Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what were looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success!

• We receive a lot of CVs and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AIits a big focus for us internally toobut without human intervention these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What were really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only younot AIknow from your previous experience. A top tip from us is to use the Achieved X as measured by Y by doing Z formula (credit: Laszlo Bock 2014) to give a really clear picture of what youve worked on. A final note: including links to your previous companies websites is a huge help and allows us to truly understand your background.
  

• Every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully they make a huge difference in our decision-making process.
  

• We are not looking to hire a software engineer for this role just as much as were not looking to hire a project manager or consultant. This is a really unique and very senior role requiring the ability to pick up technical tasks as much as the ability to manage ambiguous business context and stakeholders alignment. Weve taken great care in writing this role description to reflect the reality of the job as best as possible please ensure you read it carefully and highlight on your CV the experience relevant to what we are looking for.

About your application

• English first. Since its our company language please submit your application in English. Youll be using it a lot if you join us.

• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly we only accept applications through our systemour support team cant pass on calls or emails.

• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply even if you dont tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us.

• Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format email Well design a process that works for you.

• Your data is safe. When you apply we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data read our Privacy Policy here.

• Applying for multiple roles Nothing is stopping you and we assess every role independently. However we do look for alignment so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.

• Reapplying. If youre applying for the same role again please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.

Required Experience:

Staff IC