Staff Frontend Engineer - Web Infra

About the Role

At Rippling, Engineering is at the heart of our business and culture. We are looking for a Staff Frontend Engineer to lead our web performance charter, at the forefront of optimizing our web application for superior performance and an exceptional user experience. Drawing on your knowledge of front-end performance optimization techniques, you will lead initiatives to identify and address bottlenecks, build workflows for monitoring, profiling, and optimizing web applications, implement strategic solutions, and maintain best practices. This is a high ownership, impact, and visibility role that will create a step change in Rippling’s growth, technological evolution and enterprise readiness.

What You Will Do

• Architect and Lead: Design, build, and own the roadmap for our frontend build and development infrastructure, ensuring it is scalable, reliable, and fast.
• Implement Module Federation: Spearhead the architectural design and integration of Webpack Module Federation to enable our micro-frontend strategy at scale.
• Elevate Developer Experience: Radically improve the local development loop by optimizing build times, enhancing hot-reloading (HMR), and creating intuitive, powerful tooling.
• Evolve our Core CLI: Take full ownership of our web-cli, continuously improving its functionality and developer ergonomics while publishing telemetry to gather insights on local usage and performance.
• Optimize Performance: Drive initiatives to streamline application bundle delivery, improve build pipeline efficiency, and analyze core vitals impacted by our build process.
• Mentor and Influence: Act as a technical leader and mentor for the team and a subject matter expert for frontend build systems across the engineering platform. You will collaborate with product engineering teams to understand their needs and guide them on best practices.

What You Will Need

• Deep Technical Expertise: 10+ years of professional software development experience, with a focus on frontend infrastructure, build systems, and developer tooling.
• Strong Foundational Skills: A deep understanding of JavaScript (ESNext), TypeScript, and Node.js, particularly in the context of building CLI tools and build-related scripts.
• Architectural Vision: Proven experience designing and implementing large-scale, resilient frontend systems. You can balance short-term needs with long-term strategic goals.
• Mastery of Build Systems: Expert-level knowledge of build systems, performance tuning, and advanced features like Module Federation. Experience with modern bundlers like Vite or Turbopack is a plus.
• Leadership and Communication: A track record of leading complex, cross-team technical projects and the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. You thrive on driving technical consensus.

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.