Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Infrastructure

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

At Rippling's core is a sophisticated data platform that connects thousands of data sources through the employee record, creating a comprehensive graph that powers our entire ecosystem. This employee-centric graph enables complex workflows, approval processes, permission systems, and analytical capabilities.

We're building a high-performance, distributed data platform that must support:

• Real-time event processing across thousands of integrations
• Complex data transformations and enrichment workflows
• Low-latency queries for interactive user experiences
• Massive scale processing for analytics and reporting
• Cross-system data consistency with strong reliability guarantees

Our technology stack includes Kafka, Flink, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Apache Pinot, Apache Presto, Amazon S3—each carefully selected to address specific data processing patterns and access requirements.

What You'll Do

• Build Unified Data Pipelines: Create robust, fault-tolerant streaming pipelines that seamlessly connect disparate systems, ensuring data consistency across our distributed architecture.
• Solve Complex Distributed Systems Challenges: Tackle problems like exactly-once processing, event ordering, schema evolution, cross-datacenter replication, and graceful failure recovery.
• Drive Technical Strategy: Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap for Rippling's streaming infrastructure, making critical architecture decisions that will shape our platform for years to come.
• Scale Performance: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in our streaming infrastructure, optimizing for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency.
• Enhance Reliability: Implement error handling, retry mechanisms, monitoring, and alerting to ensure robust operation of our streaming systems.
• Knowledge Sharing: Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and mentoring junior engineers on streaming concepts and best practices.
• Operational Support: Help maintain our production streaming infrastructure and participate in on-call rotations to ensure system reliability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2 years focused on data processing or streaming systems
• Solid understanding of stream processing technologies (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, etc.)
• Experience with distributed systems and database technologies
• Proficiency in at least one JVM language (Java, Scala, Kotlin) or Python
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a fast-paced environment
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and containerized deployments

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.