Senior Software Engineer - Observability

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 is on a mission to redefine how modern businesses manage their people, and observability is at the heart of that transformation. As part of our Observability function, you’ll build a world-class toolchain that’s intuitive, massively scalable, and cost-efficient—powering visibility and insight across Rippling’s entire engineering organization.

You’ll work with technologies like Datadog, Sentry, Vantage.sh, and cutting-edge AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude by Anthropic. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role with a direct line to business-critical outcomes—stability, velocity, and scale.

What You'll Do

• Architect, build, and maintain reliable, high-performance observability systems using Python, Go, and other modern tools
• Drive the development of internal tooling that enables 800+ engineers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize production systems
• Partner with engineering teams across Rippling to understand their workflows and deliver intuitive, high-leverage solutions
• Own large-scale, distributed systems that support telemetry ingestion, alerting, and visualization
• Contribute to evolving Rippling’s infrastructure and system design as we scale to support our next phase of hypergrowth
• Lead technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience as a backend or infrastructure engineer, with a track record of shipping production systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Go
• Deep understanding of system design, reliability engineering, and performance tuning
• A builder’s mindset with a focus on simplicity, scalability, and developer experience
• Ability to collaborate across teams, drive consensus, and make smart trade-offs

Bonus Points For Experience With:

• Observability tools: Datadog, Sentry, Sumo Logic, Jaeger, OpsGenie
• Cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi, or LocalStack
• Building internal platforms or frameworks used across large engineering organizations
• A passion for improving system resilience and empowering other engineers to move faster, with confidence

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 in-office collaboration. Employees living within 30 miles of an office are expected to work onsite three days a week with those living 30-49.9 miles away expected to be in the office one day a week. Employees living over 50 miles away are required to relocate within 30 miles of an office.  To enhance team cohesiveness, new employees are asked to work onsite three days a week for their first six months.

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.