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 $1.85B+  from the world’s top investors - including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil and Goldman Sachs 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

We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years of software engineering experience to help lead the design and development of large-scale, mission-critical systems.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who can operate at high technical depth, influence across teams, and drive complex engineering initiatives from early problem definition through architecture, execution, launch, and long-term operational ownership.

The ideal candidate is not only a strong architect, but also someone who remains close to code, understands implementation trade-offs, mentors other engineers, and raises the engineering bar across the organization.

What You Will Do

• Own broad, ambiguous, and high-impact technical charters across multiple teams or systems.
• Design and build scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
• Lead architecture and technical strategy for critical platform, backend, infrastructure, or product engineering initiatives.
• Break down complex technical problems into clear execution plans.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and business stakeholders.
• Make high-quality technical decisions around scale, reliability, performance, latency, availability, observability, and long-term maintainability.
• Stay meaningfully hands-on through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, prototyping, and implementation-level decision-making.
• Identify technical risks early and drive alignment on durable solutions.
• Mentor Staff, Senior, and mid-level engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team.
• Establish engineering best practices, reusable patterns, and high standards for design, coding, testing, and operations.
• Influence technical direction without relying on formal authority.
• Improve system quality through better architecture, operational maturity, incident learnings, and platform-level thinking.

What You Need to Have

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering.
• Proven experience operating at Senior Staff / Principal / Staff+ technical scope.
• Deep hands-on engineering foundation with strong coding, debugging, design, and system-building experience.
• Strong programming ability in one or more backend/general-purpose languages such as Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Strong architecture and system design depth across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance.
• Ability to own ambiguous, cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to make trade-offs across speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
• Strong mentorship mindset with a track record of raising the technical bar for other engineers.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

What Would Be Nice To Have

• Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies.
• Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow engines, data platforms, or internal tooling.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, LLM systems, automation platforms, evaluation frameworks, or data-intensive systems.
• Experience with reliability engineering, incident management, observability, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
• Experience with security, compliance, permissions, auditability, or enterprise-grade systems.
• Prior experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains.
• Ability to operate as a “builder-leader” — someone who can define direction, align stakeholders, and still stay close to execution.