About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system.

Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About the role

Every year, companies proclaim that their most valuable asset is their people. Yet they continue to struggle with cumbersome, bespoke workforce management and time tracking tools that are poorly integrated, difficult to configure, and challenging for both admins and employees. These inefficiencies waste valuable time and create frustrating user experiences.

At Rippling, we are on a mission to revolutionize how businesses manage their workforce through deeply integrated Time Products. Our systems power some of the most critical and heavily used workflows at Rippling, including time tracking, scheduling, time away, policy configuration, approvals, compliance, and payroll-adjacent workflows.

Rippling’s Workforce Management products support a highly configurable set of policies across jurisdictions worldwide. Behind that experience is a complex backend platform: flexible rules engines, high-scale services, reliable data models, integrations across the Rippling ecosystem, and systems that must be accurate, available, and extensible.

As a Senior Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and build the core services, APIs, data models, and distributed systems that power Workforce Management at global scale. You will work on complex product and platform problems where correctness, reliability, performance, and extensibility are essential.

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who wants to operate at the intersection of product, architecture, and execution while helping define the technical foundation for one of Rippling’s most important product areas.

What you will do

• Build scalable backend systems: Design, implement, and operate high-performance backend services that power critical workforce management products.
• Own architecture and technical strategy: Drive architectural decisions across services, APIs, data models, rules engines, and integrations with the broader Rippling platform.
• Solve complex distributed systems problems: Build fault-tolerant, highly available, scalable, and extensible systems that support global customers and high-volume product usage.
• Develop core product infrastructure: Create reusable abstractions, backend frameworks, and platform capabilities that enable teams to move faster while maintaining quality and reliability.
• Drive execution from idea to production: Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to translate customer needs into durable technical solutions.
• Balance speed and safety: Deliver high-quality systems quickly while maintaining strong standards for reliability, observability, testing, and operational excellence.
• Mentor and lead: Provide technical leadership across the team and broader engineering organization, raising the bar for design, code quality, and engineering best practices.
• Shape the future of Workforce Management: As an early technical leader in this area, influence the team’s architecture, culture, processes, and long-term technical direction.

What you will need

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience: Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend systems at scale.
• Strong distributed systems expertise: Experience with service-oriented architectures, APIs, data modeling, event-driven systems, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
• Product-minded engineering approach: Ability to reason from customer and business needs, not just technical requirements. You care about building systems that enable simple, intuitive, and reliable user experiences.
• Architecture and system design depth: Strong computer science fundamentals and experience navigating complex technical tradeoffs across performance, correctness, extensibility, and maintainability.
• Experience with complex domains: Comfort working in highly configurable, rules-driven, compliance-heavy, or workflow-heavy product areas.
• Operational excellence: Experience owning production systems, debugging complex issues, improving observability, and building systems that teams can confidently operate.
• Cross-functional leadership: Ability to partner closely with product managers, designers, engineering leaders, and peer teams to drive alignment and deliver impact.
• Entrepreneurial mindset: You thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. You identify problems, take ownership, and create solutions that have lasting impact.

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accomodations@rippling.com

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.