Head of Internal AI & Automation (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, or Dublin.

Personio is making the move from individual AI access to compounding organisational capability. Every employee will soon have access to Claude Enterprise — and this role exists to ensure that access translates into a measurable, lasting transformation.

As Head of Internal AI Transformation, you will own Personio’s internal AI programme end to end: setting the strategy, managing the platform and guardrails, building and leading the central team, and partnering with every business unit to build and scale AI-powered projects across the company.

You are the person who answers “what is AI doing for Personio?” in an executive meeting — and who ensures that question always has a credible, measurable answer. You act as an internal consultant to leadership and functional teams, identifying high-leverage opportunities and guiding them from idea to implementation.

Our ambition is to allow anyone at Personio to build and unlock ROI with AI. You will manage Claude platform and define guardrails that enable anyone at Personio to create value with AI — securely and at scale.

This role sits within Data & Systems. In practice, that means the Head of Internal AI Transformation and the Data and Systems team will naturally work closely together. Whether it's connecting an AI solution to a Snowflake model, wiring up a Salesforce integration, or ensuring the semantic layer underpinning an insight is solid — many of the most important AI builds will have a D&S dependency, and vice versa.

This role operates in a matrixed environment where influence matters as much as authority. The AI Ops Specialist network — the primary adoption engine across every business unit — is distributed, nominated from within existing teams, and does not report to this role. Success here depends on building a programme compelling enough that people want to be part of it, and a community strong enough that the network delivers without a direct line.

Role Responsibilities: What you'll do

Strategy & Roadmap

• Define Personio's internal AI strategy and 2-year roadmap, sequencing use cases across the entire organisation by business value

• Own the prioritisation framework that connects Business Unit-level use cases to the central build queue

• Lead a structured AI watch — tracking market trends, peer practices, regulatory evolution, and emerging tools — and translate insights into prioritised pilots, internal playbooks, and process improvements

• Report quarterly to leadership on AI programme adoption, ROI, and roadmap progress — you make transformation measurable
  

Platform Management, governance and security

• Own the AI Enterprise platform end to end: account configuration, RBAC design, spend management, access tiers, and the vendor relationship

• Manage the AI Tool Register — the central inventory of every process, workflow, and AI-powered tool at Personio.

• Define and enforce the build vs. buy framework for AI point solutions — assessing, approving, or deprecating tools that fall outside the core platform.

• Ensure every registered tool has a documented data handling classification and security review status.

• Enforce the lifecycle process from use case registration through to deprecation, preventing ungoverned sprawl that compounds into security and technical debt

• Stay close to the AI platform landscape and lead contract negotiations and renewals

• Partner with the Security and Legal teams to maintain Personio's AI risk posture — including data classification rules for what can and cannot be passed to AI models, incident response protocols for AI-related breaches or misuse, and regular security reviews of production AI applications.

Supporting the Company to Build & Scale

• Coordinate the AI Ops Specialist network embedded in each business unit — their primary escalation point, community anchor, and the person who turns their prototypes into production

• Drive AI literacy and capability across every team at Personio— through structured onboarding, enablement tracks, and a library of reusable prompt templates and workflow guides

• Design and run the change management programme that shifts Personio from ‘broad access’ to ‘smart, high-value use’ under a consumption-based model

• Support non-engineer builders (Cowork users) with the governance, templates, and office hours infrastructure they need to build safely and confidently

• Own the process automation framework — identifying, prioritising, and scaling automation opportunities across business units. AI Solutions Engineers own the full build journey from validated prototype to production for Claude-native workflows and advanced/cross functional process automation.

• Ensure the creation of reusable internal assets, playbooks, and reference implementations that capture what great looks like and make it repeatable across the organisation
  

Data & Systems Partnership

• Own the interface between the Internal AI team and Data & Systems — ensuring use case roadmaps, build handoffs, and governance frameworks stay coordinated and mutually reinforcing

• Co-develop the AI use case roadmap with the Data & Systems leadership on a shared cadence

• Rely on the Data team's semantic layer, metric definitions, and data quality standards as the foundation for every AI solution — and feed the programme's evolving data requirements into the Data team's roadmap early, not as a last-minute dependency

• Jointly review any AI point solution that requires data connectivity or D&S systems integration before approval or deprecation — preventing ungoverned procurement that creates integration debt for both teams

• Ensure AI governance and data governance stay coordinated — the Internal AI team owns acceptable use policy and the AI Tool Register; the Data team owns data classification and agent evaluation standards; this role is accountable for ensuring neither creates blind spots for the other
  

Team Leadership

• Hire, onboard, and develop a team of AI Solutions Engineers — the production arm of the central team, responsible for taking validated use cases from prototype to reliable, secure, production-grade applications

• Build the team culture, operating rhythms, and community of practice that makes the hub-and-spoke model work in practice

• Act as the escalation point and quality bar for everything the team ships. Influence teams that do not report to you, driving alignment and navigating tradeoffs at executive level.

Role Requirements: What you need to succeed

• A clear vision-setter — you can articulate where AI is taking Personio before the rest of the organisation can see it, and bring people along through compelling narratives as much as through structured plans

• A skilled navigator of complexity — you're comfortable operating in ambiguous, matrixed environments where influence matters more than authority, and where driving change requires reading organisational dynamics as much as building the right programme

• Consulting DNA who can deliver results/outcomes — you've driven large-scale change programmes, ideally with a background in management consulting or a similar environment where you had to quickly diagnose problems, align diverse stakeholders, and deliver measurable impact without owning the people doing the work

• Proven ability to drive outcomes through people who don’t report to you — you’ve led programmes where your success depended on a distributed network of contributors outside your direct team; you know how to build accountability without authority and create pull rather than push

• Hands-on automation fluency — you’ve shipped real AI-powered workflows yourself, not just overseen others doing it; you know what good looks like from the inside

• Working knowledge of AI-specific security and risk considerations — prompt injection, data leakage via LLM context, third-party model data handling, and the difference between governed and ungoverned AI use.

• 8+ years of experience spanning AI or digital transformation, with at least 3–4 years in a senior cross-functional leadership role

• Proven track record of managing an enterprise AI or productivity platform at scale — you've owned vendor relationships, RBAC frameworks, and consumption-based budgets before

• Experience hiring and leading technical contributors, with enough engineering depth to set the quality bar and unblock your team

• Strong enough technical depth to hold substantive conversations about LLM pipelines, RAG architecture, and agentic workflows — and sharp enough commercial instinct to prioritise by business value

• Experience driving organisation-wide adoption of new tools or capabilities — you've solved last-mile problems, run change management programmes, and built communities of practice

• Comfortable managing senior stakeholders and translating ambiguous AI opportunity into a funded, governed programme with measurable milestones

• Genuine curiosity about the AI landscape: you stay close to what's shipping and bring informed opinions on where it's heading

• The following are additional pluses:

  • Experience in B2B SaaS or HR tech

  • Familiarity with Anthropic's product suite (Claude Enterprise, Claude Code, Cowork)

  • Experience operating in a hub-and-spoke or centre-of-excellence model across a multi-Business Unit organisation

  • Comfort creating clear, engaging internal content — playbooks, case studies, reference implementations — that makes best practice sticky

  • Engineering background: You are comfortable diving into architecture and technical design discussions.

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 3 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. 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.