Senior Staff Software Engineer - Platform

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

We’re hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to help shape the next generation of Rippling’s platform technologies. This is a high-impact role for a distributed systems generalist who thrives in ambiguity, loves solving complex problems, and is excited to help define what the future of our platform looks like—especially as we expand our developer ecosystem and AI-powered experiences.

Rippling platform operates as a scaled team which owns and operates a variety of mission-critical systems. We support close to 1,000 Engineers building products and internal platforms at Rippling and deliver the most foundational shared systems inside the Platform organization.  Built on top of a dynamically stitched and user-permissioned ontology, a performant and scalable object platform store, an event-driven dependency tracking system, and Rippling Query Language (RQL), our platform offers many shared systems and building blocks for entire clouds of products at Rippling. Teams include automation (workflows and approvals), group management, object platform, application building, search and AI platform, object graph (ontology) and data cataloging, and more.

We are actively hiring into multiple teams and will continue expanding into 2025.

We are looking for a leader who can further unlock the potential of the team by investing in robustly scaling distributed systems, world-class operations, and delivering large platform leverage to internal teams. This role also facilitates the platform as a product and optimizes delivery around an impactful roadmap, very closely aligned with strategic and executive priorities. The ideal candidate can architect, design, and implement high scale and durable solutions to the most challenging technical problems.  This role focuses equally on design, implementation, and leadership for engineers working on the projects the role is leading.

What you will do

The technical challenges we are facing are complex. We need a seasoned technical expert who has built complex platforms and products for global technology companies before. Your responsibilities will include:

• Acting as a technical leader within the engineering organization.
• Designing and architecting projects of high complexity that involve multiple stakeholders across the organization
• Taking ambiguous technical problem statements and transmuting them into working software
• Working across multiple domains
• Working directly with senior engineering leadership to increase technical quality
• Participating in code and design reviews
• Owning the overall outcome of projects as the technical directly responsible individual

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience as a software engineer
• You have seen systems operating at significant technical and organizational scale
• Experience working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
• Experience in building projects with good abstractions and architecture
• Comfortable at developing scalable and extendable core services used in many products
• Expertise building complex, distributed services with Python, Golang, or Java
• Strong CS knowledge
• Bonus points if you’ve previously worked with AWS
• You care about product ownership and solving problems for our customers.
• You’re passionate about being in a product-focused environment where everyone cares deeply about customer impact

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.