Staff 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

• Architect for Scale: Design and implement next-generation streaming data infrastructure to handle 100x growth in data volume and velocity while maintaining performance and reliability SLAs.
• 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.
• Mentor and Lead: Guide junior engineers through complex technical challenges, establish best practices, and elevate the entire team's capabilities through knowledge sharing and code reviews.
• Operational Excellence: Implement sophisticated observability solutions, establish SLOs, create runbooks, and participate in on-call rotations to ensure the reliability of mission-critical systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building distributed systems with a focus on high-throughput data processing
• Deep expertise with stream processing technologies (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, etc.)
• Experience working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Experience in building projects with the right user abstractions and architecture.
• Comfortable developing scalable and extendable core services used in many products.

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.