Staff Software Engineer

About Rippling

Rippling is the first way for businesses to manage all of their HR & IT—payroll, benefits, computers, apps, and more—in one unified workforce platform.

By connecting every business system to one source of truth for employee data, businesses can automate all of the manual work they normally need to do to make employee changes. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can just click a button and set up a new employees’ payroll, health insurance, work computer, and third-party apps—like Slack, Zoom, and Office 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.35B from the world's top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Bedrock, and Greenoaks—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes (#12 out of 500)

About the Role
We are seeking a passionate and highly experienced Staff Software Engineer to join our Employment Products team. As a senior most engineer and architect of the team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling a first-of-its-kind Employments product. You will work on complex domains across 10+ countries, building a clean DSL for internal stakeholders, large-scale distributed systems, and cutting-edge performance analytics. Your work will have a direct impact on building a world class payroll product which accelerates success of expanding to more countries in a 10x shorter time span.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and maintain large-scale, distributed systems and scalable services for the Rippling Unity Platform.
• Set the direction for engineering best practices and technology adoption.
• Engage in coding and code reviews using Python, Golang, and Java.
• Guide and support engineers, fostering a culture of learning and technical excellence.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to align on goals and ensure successful project outcomes.
• Design and implement clean, modular APIs, including Backend for Frontend (BFF) systems.
• Architect systems capable of supporting millions of users, ensuring performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Design analytical and transactional systems (e.g., Presto, S3, Snowflake, MySQL, Aurora, MongoDB) to handle petabyte-scale data.
• Implement streaming solutions (e.g., Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Kafka Connect) for transactional and analytical workflows.
• Establish robust observability practices, including monitoring, logging, and tracing.
• Maintain standards and comprehensive documentation for system architecture and operations.

Qualifications

• Experience: 9+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a role leading architecture, designing consumer facing products and building systems.
• Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in backend development, distributed systems, and large-scale data pipelines.
• Data Pipeline Experience: Hands-on experience with data processing frameworks
• Scalability and Performance: Deep knowledge of building and scaling real-time, high-throughput systems.
• Consumer-Facing Product Development: Experience working on consumer-grade applications with a focus on intuitive user experiences.