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

As the Senior Staff Engineer for the Payroll Platform team, you will be the lead architect for Rippling’s payroll platform engine that enables and supports critical flows around payroll processing, approvals, corrections, and more.

In addition, this role will have a significant impact on Rippling’s growth and success, and make technical and business decisions which will shape the future of the product and company. We are looking for someone who takes immense pride in building excellent scalable products, building winning teams and being able to rally these towards a vision, and can attract and retain top talent.

What you will do

• Architect the Orchestration Engine: Set the technical strategy for the "middle layer" of payroll, building a high-scale engine that absorbs raw HR inputs and orchestrates them across calculation engines to produce final financial outputs.
• Scale for the Enterprise: Lead the re-architecture of our backend systems to handle a 10x increase in scale, ensuring performance and reliability for massive employee bases (20k+ per company).
• Define Platform Primitives: Design and deliver the core data models, APIs, and services that serve as the "tail engine" for Run Management, creating abstractions that simplify complex payroll workflows.
• Lead Technical Strategy: Drive the long-term vision for how payroll "runs" are managed, focusing on idempotency, fault tolerance, and high-concurrency processing within a distributed environment.
• Influence Across the Org: Partner with the Onboarding and Payroll Processing pods to ensure seamless data flow, acting as the technical authority on how the platform scales to support upmarket opportunities.
• Raise the Engineering Bar: Mentor senior engineers and staff-level peers, fostering a culture of technical excellence in distributed systems and platform design.

What you will need

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a background in building core platforms at massive scale (e.g., AWS Infra, Door Dash Platform, or similar high-concurrency environments).
• Deep Backend Expertise: A proven track record of designing distributed systems and orchestration layers that handle complex data transformations.
• Experience with Scale: You have seen "the movie" before at a high-growth company and know how to evolve a platform from mid-market to enterprise-grade requirements.
• Platform-First Mindset: You enjoy building systems where the "customer" is often other engineering teams, focusing on extensibility, reliability, and technical primitives.
• Leadership & Vision: The ability to steer an entire organization toward a new architectural future while balancing the needs of a rapidly evolving global product.

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 accommodations@rippling.com

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.