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, we're 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 you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ 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 can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re 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. You’ll 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. You’ll 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, you’ll bring structure and direction: shaping architecture, guiding technical decisions, driving change management, and helping prioritise what we build and why. You’ll 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 you’re excited by owning a domain end-to-end, setting direction while staying hands-on, scaling impact, this team and role is for you. Who you'll be working with and reporting to You'll join the People Tech team, part of Pleo's 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. We're a collaborative, forward-thinking team focused on security, scalability, and crafting an exceptional internal experience for every Pleoer. What you'll 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: we've already shipped Harriet and we're 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 we're doing, what we're 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 updates,contract 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, Remote.com, Docusign, Contractbook and Sana. Our