Staff Software Engineer - Documents AI

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 $1.4+B 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 official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses. 

About the Role

Documents are embedded across nearly every part of the employee lifecycle, powering critical experiences across HR, payroll, benefits, compliance, and more. The Documents Platform team builds the shared infrastructure and primitives for creating, generating, importing, signing, annotating, understanding, tracking, and managing documents across Rippling.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will define the technical vision for the next generation of Rippling’s Document Platform and lead the charter to make AI a foundational part of the product. You’ll work closely with Rippling’s AI teams, product teams, and engineering leaders to identify high-impact opportunities, establish durable platform abstractions, and turn advances in AI into reliable, secure, and intuitive document experiences.

This is a highly cross-functional technical leadership role. You will shape architecture across Documents AI, align teams around a cohesive strategy, and lead the execution of complex initiatives spanning intelligent document generation, extraction, understanding, transformation, and workflow automation.

What You Will Do

• Set the Technical Vision: Define and drive the long-term architecture and technical roadmap for Documents Platform and AI.
• Lead the Document AI Charter: Identify and deliver high-impact applications of AI across the document lifecycle, from creation and understanding to workflow automation.
• Build AI-Native Platform Capabilities: Develop reusable APIs, services, evaluation frameworks, and platform primitives that enable product teams to build intelligent document experiences quickly and safely.
• Partner Across Rippling: Work closely with AI partners, product teams, and engineering leaders to translate emerging AI capabilities and customer needs into a cohesive platform strategy.
• Deliver Trusted AI Experiences: Establish strong foundations for quality, security, privacy, observability, and evaluation so AI-powered document features are reliable in business-critical workflows.
• Lead Complex Initiatives: Drive ambiguous, cross-team programs from exploration and architectural design through production rollout and iteration.
• Raise the Engineering Bar: Provide technical leadership and mentorship, influence decisions across organizational boundaries, and establish patterns that improve engineering quality across the platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership on complex product or platform initiatives.
• Strong Product & Platform Instincts: You translate ambiguous problems into simple, scalable systems, APIs, and reusable solutions.
• End-to-End Ownership: You can operate across backend architecture, data models, APIs, and user-facing experiences.
• Technical Leadership: You lead cross-functional initiatives, influence technical direction, and align teams around complex problems.
• Strong Engineering Fundamentals: You design reliable, scalable systems and can quickly learn new technologies; Python experience is 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 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.