Director of Engineering - Data Cloud

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

Rippling’s Data Cloud powers the backbone of decision-making for thousands of businesses—turning billions of rows of data into actionable insights through reporting, dashboards, exploration, and advanced analytics.

At the core of this experience are the systems that manage the entire data lifecycle. We are tackling some of the most complex challenges in data at scale: high-volume ingestion pipelines, real-time transformations, metadata-rich catalogs, and fine-grained governance.

As Director of Engineering, you will own the ingestion, transformation, and catalog systems that underpin every analytic experience at Rippling. You’ll define the vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap—while ensuring we ship incremental value every quarter.

This is not just a management role. You’ll combine technical depth, strategic clarity, and operational excellence to build world-class systems and a world-class team. You’ll partner with senior leaders across product, engineering, and go-to-market, and your impact will be measured in how confidently customers can explore, trust, and act on their data.

The ideal candidate has led high-scale distributed systems efforts, thrives in ambitious, high-ambiguity environments, and obsesses over building platforms that are not only scalable and reliable, but also deeply intuitive to use.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers and engineering managers, fostering a culture of ownership and high performance.
• Partner with product leaders to define the product strategy and roadmap for our data products, including data ingestion, transformation engines, and our data catalog.
• Collaborate with product, design, and other engineering and business leaders to align on product vision and deliver products that solve complex customer problems.
• Drive the product lifecycle from ideation and discovery to launch and post-launch optimization.
• Take ambiguous business challenges and turn them into clear, actionable product requirements and strategies.
• Be the voice of the customer, deeply understanding their needs to ensure our data products deliver unprecedented value and a seamless user experience.
• Act as an advocate for technical excellence, pushing for solutions that are scalable, reliable, and secure at an internet scale.
• Inspire and coach your team to continuously improve, fostering a culture of innovation and learning.
• Build strong relationships across the organization, ensuring your team’s products are seamlessly integrated and adopted by other teams.

What you will need

• 12+ years of experience in engineering leadership roles, with a proven track record of building and launching data-centric products.
• Deep expertise in data infrastructure, platforms, and products, with a strong understanding of the modern data stack (e.g., ETL/ELT, data governance, and data warehousing).
• Demonstrated experience scaling products from "0 to 1" in a fast-paced environment.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and inspire product and engineering teams to achieve ambitious goals.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate a compelling product vision to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience influencing cross-functional teams and senior leadership to gain buy-in and align on priorities.
• A master of translating customer needs and market trends into a clear, compelling product strategy.
• Skilled at making tough trade-off decisions based on data and business needs.