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

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead Rippling’s Agentic Talent platform, a world where people and AI agents work together.

As a technical leader, your goal is to create intuitive experiences for people alongside secure, reliable capabilities that enable agents to understand context, take action, and coordinate complex talent workflows.

Close partnership with Product and AI Platform leadership will be central to defining the vision, prototyping new ideas, and building products that fundamentally reshape how organizations manage talent throughout the employee lifecycle.

Architecture ownership goes hand in hand with deep, hands-on development. The scope spans building and operating highly available, scalable systems; owning critical software throughout its lifecycle; and mentoring senior and earlier-career engineers on a fast-moving team with tremendous impact.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, builds from first principles, and wants to create category-defining products backed by one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world. Success requires strong product judgment, an obsession with customer behavior, and a drive to replace repetitive processes with intelligent, adaptable workflows.

What you will do

• Build Exceptional Products: Develop scalable, maintainable, high-performance systems that power critical talent products and workflows.
• Move Fast with Precision: Deliver high-quality capabilities quickly while balancing iteration speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive Architecture and Design: Lead architectural decisions across the product lifecycle, from early prototypes through production. Apply systems thinking to build fault-tolerant, highly available, scalable, and extensible systems.
• Own Operational Excellence: Establish strong standards for observability, reliability, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner closely with product managers, designers, AI Platform engineers, and customers to shape the roadmap and turn ambiguous problems into compelling products.
• Mentor and Lead: Raise the technical bar through design reviews, thoughtful abstractions, engineering best practices, and mentorship across experience levels.
• Shape the Team: As an early member, directly influence the team’s technical direction, culture, structure, and ways of working.

What you will need

• Experience: 8+ years of full stack software development experience, including designing and operating large-scale systems. Experience with Python, Django, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, clean abstractions, and event-driven architectures is strongly preferred. On the front end side, React experience is preferred.
• Technical Depth: Strong command of computer science fundamentals and distributed-system design, including asynchronous processing, caching, data modeling, and database scaling.
• Platform Thinking: Experience designing extensible services, APIs, or primitives used across multiple products and workflows.
• Product Judgment: A deep interest in customer behavior, product design, and delivering intuitive, polished experiences. We’re not just writing code.
• Technical Leadership: A track record of navigating ambiguity, defining technical direction, scoping complex work, reviewing designs, and helping other engineers grow.
• Founder Mindset: Comfort operating in fast-moving, unstructured environments and proactively identifying opportunities to improve both the product and how the team builds it.

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 accommodations@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.