Senior 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, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil and Goldman Sachs—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 HRIS Product Team at Rippling:

Rippling is rapidly expanding its customer base, supporting larger enterprise customers, and launching new lines of business across its 20+ products, all while scaling globally. At the hear of this ecosystem is Employee Records, a foundational element that powers not only HR products but also integrates seamlessly with every product to deliver a unified, cohesive experience.

The HRIS (Human Resources Information Systems) team plays a critical role in managing all aspects of employee data, including hiring, onboarding, offboarding, and transitions. The team's mission is to ensure the correctness and completeness of employee records, which serve as the backbone of Rippling’s ecosystem.

HRIS operates at the forefront of Rippling’s growth, building new products at high velocity to support expansion into new verticals and customer segments while maintaining the integrity of data. As the entry point for any new customer or product integration, the HRIS team is pivotal to delivering Rippling’s vision of a unified platform for modern workforce management.

HRIS Product Verticals

HRIS Flows Experience: Focused on creating simple, intuitive workflows that empower Rippling's customers to manage employee data seamlessly.

HRIS Flows Infrastructure: Provides the scalable backbone for all flow products, prioritizing reliability, data integrity, and performance at scale.

HR Applications: Develops essential tools and interfaces for customers to view, manage, and interact with employee data effectively.

Org Management: Enables the creation and maintenance of company structures tailored to organizations of all sizes and complexities.

We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Staff Engineers to join our Rippling HRIS team. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in building internet-scale distributed systems, developing scalable services, and crafting clean, modular APIs. This role requires deep expertise in both analytical and transactional systems, and a strong understanding of Scalability , Concurrency , SLAs, system resiliency, and observability. The candidate should be proficient in coding with languages such as Python, Golang, and Java, and experienced in handling systems with millions of users.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and Lead: Design, develop, and maintain internet-scale, highly distributed systems and scalable services for the Rippling HRIS team.
• Hands-On Coding: Actively participate in coding and code reviews, using languages such as Python, Golang, and Java.
• Technical Leadership: Provide visionary technical leadership, setting the direction for engineering best practices and the adoption of advanced technologies.
• Mentorship: Mentor and support engineers across the organization, fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and technical excellence.
• System Design: Architect systems capable of handling millions of users simultaneously, ensuring high performance, reliability, and scalability.
• API Development: Design and implement clean, modularized abstraction APIs and programmatic APIs for both end users and engineers, including Backend for Frontend (BFF) systems.
• Storage Solutions: Design and implement Analytical systems that encompass both analytical (e.g., Presto, S3, Snowflake) and transactional (e.g., MySQL, Aurora, MongoDB) systems. They should be able to handle petabyte scale
• Resiliency and SLAs: Develop and maintain systems with high availability and reliability, targeting four or five 9s (99.99% or 99.999%) uptime.
• Observability: Implement comprehensive observability practices, including monitoring, logging, and tracing, to ensure system health and performance.
• Streaming and Workflow Systems: Build and integrate streaming solutions (e.g., Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Kafka Connect) and workflow systems for both transactional and analytical workflows.
• Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, data science, and operations, to align on strategic goals and ensure successful project delivery.
• Innovation: Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies, driving innovation and continuous improvement within the Rippling HRIS team.
• Documentation and Standards: Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation and standards for system architecture, design, and operational processes.

What success looks like

• Org-level leverage: Product teams ship faster without re-implementing common patterns or unintentionally breaking critical paths.
• Performance & reliability: App Shell consistently meets defined SLAs for performance and reliability, with regressions caught automatically.
• Consistency at scale: Core UI behaviors (grids, editor, navigation, flows) behave predictably across the product.
• Platform adoption: New and existing teams adopt UI Platform services as defaults rather than building bespoke solutions.
• Technical leadership: Engineers across the org look to you for architectural guidance and platform direction.

What We’re Looking For

• 15+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend, distributed, or platform systems.
• Deep programming experience in one or more backend languages such as Golang, Java, or Python.
• Strong fundamentals in backend architecture, including API design, data modelling, service boundaries, dependency management, concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure isolation.
• Proven experience building internal platforms or foundational systems used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience designing guardrails, validation systems, and automated enforcement mechanisms—not just publishing guidelines.
• Strong operational ownership, including observability, debugging, incident response, capacity planning, and production reliability.
• Experience leading complex architectural initiatives and large-scale migrations across multiple teams.
• Ability to influence engineering direction without relying on direct reporting authority.
• Comfortable balancing hands-on coding and technical execution with architecture, mentorship, and organizational leadership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly through design documents, RFCs, architecture reviews, and cross-team alignment.

Bonus Points

• Experience building configuration-driven platforms, workflow engines, orchestration systems, developer platforms, or low-code frameworks.
• Experience owning foundational platform systems adopted by hundreds of engineers or multiple product organizations.
• Background in safely migrating thousands of existing configurations, workflows, or application instances onto new platforms.
• Experience establishing performance budgets, reliability guardrails, platform governance, and automated architectural enforcement.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted developer tooling to accelerate migrations, automate refactoring, validate invariants, or review large-scale system changes.
• Familiarity with web or mobile application architecture and the backend infrastructure required to support complex user-facing platforms.