Staff Software Engineer

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 $1.85B+ 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 are looking for Staff Software Engineers to join engineering teams across Rippling.
• As a Staff Engineer, you will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for solving some of the most complex engineering problems within your area.
• You will design and build large-scale systems, influence architecture, lead technically complex initiatives, and partner closely with Product and Engineering teams to turn ambiguous business problems into simple, scalable solutions.
• You will operate across the full engineering lifecycle, from understanding the customer problem and defining the architecture to writing code, reviewing critical implementations, debugging production issues, and evolving systems as Rippling scales.
• This is an individual contributor role with significant technical influence. You will help establish engineering direction, mentor other engineers, and raise the technical bar across the organization while continuing to stay close to the code.

What You Will Do

• Build at scale: Design, build, and operate reliable, scalable, and high-performance systems that power critical Rippling products.
• Own complex technical problems: Take ambiguous, high-impact engineering problems and drive them from architecture through implementation and production.
• Stay hands-on: Write production code, review critical code paths, debug complex issues, and make implementation-level technical decisions.
• Drive architecture: Define technical designs and make thoughtful trade-offs across scalability, performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and development velocity.
• Lead technical initiatives: Drive large engineering projects that may span multiple systems, teams, or product areas.
• Build reusable systems: Create platforms, APIs, abstractions, and infrastructure that can be leveraged by multiple teams and products across Rippling.
• Solve for reliability: Design systems with strong principles around resiliency, observability, availability, data integrity, and operational excellence.
• Partner with Product: Work closely with Product Managers and Engineering leaders to understand customer problems and influence both product and technical direction.
• Raise the engineering bar: Improve engineering practices through design reviews, code reviews, technical standards, documentation, and thoughtful technical guidance.
• Mentor engineers: Help other engineers improve their system design, technical judgment, execution, and ownership.
• Think ahead: Identify architectural bottlenecks and technical risks before they become limitations to Rippling's growth.

What We Are Looking For

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Strong hands-on programming ability and a desire to remain close to code, debugging, design reviews, and implementation details.
• Strong programming experience in one or more languages such as Python, Go/Golang, Java, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and scalable system design.
• Strong fundamentals across APIs, data modeling, databases, concurrency, performance, caching, reliability, and production operations.
• Experience designing systems that handle significant scale, traffic, data volume, or complex business workflows.
• Strong understanding of system resiliency, SLAs/SLOs, observability, monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Experience designing clean APIs, services, and abstractions that can evolve as products and engineering organizations scale.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, identify the most important technical problems, and independently drive them toward resolution.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex initiatives involving multiple engineers or teams without relying on formal authority.
• Strong product intuition and the ability to connect technical decisions with customer and business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical quality of the teams around you.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical ideas clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building products or platforms through significant stages of growth, including 0 to 1 and 1 to 100.
• Experience working in fast-growing product or technology companies.
• Experience building high-volume SaaS, enterprise, platform, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Experience with technologies similar to Rippling's stack, including Python, Golang, React, MongoDB, Kafka, Temporal, and AWS.
• Experience with transactional and analytical data systems.
• Experience building developer platforms, workflow systems, data platforms, infrastructure, AI-powered systems, or complex enterprise products.

Why Rippling

• The technical problems at Rippling sit at the intersection of product engineering, distributed systems, data, infrastructure, automation, and platform engineering.
• A change in one part of Rippling can affect multiple products and workflows across HR, IT, and Finance. Building these experiences requires systems that are scalable, reliable, flexible, and deeply interconnected.
• As a Staff Engineer, you will have the opportunity to work on technically challenging problems while having meaningful influence on architecture, product direction, and the broader engineering organization.
• You will have the autonomy to identify important problems, the ownership to drive them end to end, and the opportunity to build systems that can have impact across Rippling.

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.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that official communication regarding Rippling opportunities will only be sent from @rippling.com email addresses.

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office, Rippling considers working in the office at least three days a week under the current policy to be an essential function of the role.