Product Design Lead, Permissions

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, 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

As the Product Design Lead focused on Permissions, you’ll shape one of the most critical parts of Rippling’s ecosystem: how access, authorization, and org context power every experience. Our knowledge of each employee—who they are, which team they’re on, and how the org is structured—is a big part of what makes Rippling feel like magic. There’s far less fussing with granular access controls if you don’t want to and powerful control when you do.

You’ll lead the design of a unified permissions framework that powers access control across Rippling. You’ll craft platform primitives that let product teams plug seamlessly into a shared system, while also building customer‑facing experiences that are polished, adaptive, and clear. You’ll partner closely with individual product teams to reduce friction, prevent policy drift, and deliver a coherent, trustworthy model of permissions across the platform.

This is a role for a designer who thrives on complexity and scale—you have to love the complexity. You’ll work closely with product and engineering peers who move quickly, and you'll join a design org that values autonomy, depth, and impact. We ship fast, sweat the details, and treat permissions as a platform challenge, not just a set of toggles. Success here is measured not just in pixels shipped, but in safety, clarity, and the quality of the foundation you lay for every product Rippling offers.

If you’ve led design for permissions, identity and access management, admin platforms, or other platform‑scale B2B products—and you’re excited to own a capability that influences nearly every experience in the product—we’d love to talk.

What you will do

• Design the end‑to‑end permissions system for Rippling—roles, groups, org‑aware policies, fine‑grained entitlements, approvals/elevation, delegation, and auditability—across both admin and end‑user surfaces.
• Get close to customers, administrators, and internal product teams; study how access is granted and managed today; map mental models and failure points; and translate insights into clear, scalable design priorities that drive real business impact.
• Build reusable capabilities and platform primitives—policy builder UIs, default role templates, an entitlement catalog, “why/why not” explainability, and simulation tools—that scale across Rippling’s product offerings and ensure coherent patterns platform‑wide.
• Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Security/Identity, and GTM to scope, prototype, and ship new functionality—unblocking dependencies, writing crisp RFCs and system diagrams, and negotiating trade‑offs along the way.

What you will need

• 8+ years of end‑to‑end product design experience, with a portfolio of complex, high‑impact platform work delivered from initial concept through iteration and delivery.
• Demonstrated experience designing permissions/access control/identity (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, entitlements, policy engines) or similarly complex systems—and the ability to model them so others can reason about and build against them.
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills; you make the abstract concrete with diagrams, narratives, and walkthroughs that align executives, engineers, and GTM partners.
• Proven ability to think in systems and simplify complexity without losing nuance, with experience in challenging domains or compliance‑heavy environments.
• A strong eye for visual and interaction craft, with the ability to produce clear, detailed specifications and contribute to the development of our design system.
• Relentless customer focus, backed by a habit of digging into real behavior, identifying pain points, and designing solutions that solve meaningful problems.
• A bias toward action, especially in ambiguous or fast‑moving environments—you generate many ideas, iterate quickly, unblock dependencies, and own timelines without daily oversight.

If you don't necessarily meet all of these requirements, we still encourage you to apply. Skills transfer in unexpected ways, and diverse perspectives often lead to the most innovative solutions.

Additional Information

Rippling is an 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.

The pay range for this role is:

165,000 - 288,750 USD per year (US Tier 1)