Product Lead - Employee Data & Lifecycle

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's employee graph is the backbone of every product we build — every workflow, integration, and downstream system ultimately reads from or writes to it. The Employee Lifecycle team owns the moments when that graph changes (role transitions, profile updates, terminations) and the core surfaces where admins and employees interact with that data.

This role exists at a specific inflection point. Rippling's HRIS product wins decisively in the SMB market; the next wave of growth is enterprise, and the gaps that stand between us and that market sit almost entirely in this surface area. The PM who takes this role will define how we close those gaps — sequencing the work, making the architectural calls, and shaping a product experience that holds up at enterprise scale. The goal is to move from parity to category leadership in enterprise HRIS.

The work itself is a rare combination. The underlying systems are genuinely complex — stackable changes to the employee record, bulk operations across tens of thousands of employees, downstream contracts with payroll, permissions, and every other Rippling product. The user-facing surfaces have to hide all of that behind interfaces that admins and employees can trust and navigate without thinking. Doing both well is the job.

You'll own the roadmap end-to-end across Terminations, Transitions, Employee Apps, and the HRIS Platform layer. You'll make the calls on what to build, how to sequence it, and where to draw the line between scale, latency, and velocity.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end roadmap for core employee lifecycle (Terminations, Transitions & Employee Apps and HRIS Platform) systems and surfaces, setting direction, prioritizing high-impact work, and making clear sequencing decisions that balance speed, scale, and correctness
• Lead the development of critical workflows that power employee changes across their lifecycle, ensuring these flows are intuitive for users while handling the underlying complexity required for accuracy across systems
• Drive enterprise readiness for high-stakes features by coordinating across partner teams and ensuring seamless interoperability with downstream systems and workflows
• Set and uphold a high bar for reliability and correctness, treating issues as product failures, driving root cause resolution, and continuously improving system robustness and user trust
• Define and own success metrics across the product surface, including workflow completion, system performance, reliability, and downstream impact, and use these to inform product strategy and execution
• Represent your product areas in cross-functional planning and leadership discussions, committing to clear outcomes, proactively identifying risks, and making trade-offs when priorities or constraints shift
• Operate as the central point of accountability across a distributed engineering team, building strong execution partnerships, driving alignment, and ensuring consistent delivery across time zones
• Communicate clearly with senior stakeholders, translating complex trade-offs into crisp decisions and ensuring visibility into progress, risks, and impact

What you will need

• 8+ years of product management experience, with significant ownership of technically complex, user-facing products in a high-scale environment
• Strong UX instincts on technically complex surfaces — you've shipped products where the underlying problem was genuinely hard (multi-team dependencies, intertwined system changes, non-obvious user behavior) but the resulting experience felt simple and coherent.
• Systems thinking across product surfaces — you naturally reason about how a change in one place compounds downstream (e.g., a profile change that ripples into compensation, payroll, permissions, and audit trails), and you treat those downstream effects as part of your product, not someone else's problem
• Cross-functional leadership across multiple teams, with a track record of driving parallel execution, aligning stakeholders, and bringing intertwined work to the finish line without slowing delivery
• A product-quality view of reliability and performance — you treat latency, correctness, and trust as part of the user experience, not as an infrastructure concern owned elsewhere. You've made deliberate trade-offs between scale, latency, and velocity and can articulate why
• Strong technical judgment to engage credibly with engineering on data modeling, APIs, and system design, and to influence architectural decisions — though you don't need to have been a platform PM by title
• AI fluency in your day-to-day — you actively use AI in how you work and build, and have a point of view on where it belongs in the product
• Experience in HR, payroll, or other systems of record is a plus, particularly involving data integrity, compliance, and auditability. Platform or infrastructure PM experience is also a plus but not required

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 [email protected]

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.