Staff Software Engineer at Rippling

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 $1.8B 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

Rippling's Tax Platform is one of only ~5 companies globally that owns the full tax calculation and filing stack. We process over $30 billion in annual payroll for 1 million+ employees—growing 50% year-over-year. Our systems handle millions of payroll transactions across multiple countries, ensuring tax correctness across 4,000+ jurisdictions while staying compliant with constantly changing tax regulations.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical strategy, drive architectural decisions, and shape the future of our tax infrastructure. You'll have function-wide impact and set the standard for engineering excellence across teams.

What You Will Do

• System Design: Lead architecture for mission-critical systems handling billions in tax calculations; make decisions that define how the platform scales for 50% YoY growth
• Ownership & Impact: Drive initiatives with function-wide visibility; your work shapes roadmaps and influences company strategy
• Engineering Excellence: Define and champion engineering standards across teams; establish patterns that scale with the organization
• Reliability & Correctness: Design systems where failure is not an option; build for auditability, correctness, and graceful degradation at scale
• Global Scale: Tackle architectural challenges of processing millions of payroll transactions across multiple countries with 4,000+ jurisdictions and evolving regulations
• Technical Leadership: Be the technical voice in cross-functional decisions; translate business needs into technical strategy

What You Will Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership
• Proven ability to architect large-scale distributed systems with high reliability requirements
• Deep expertise in any OOPs language and experience designing systems that other engineers build on
• Track record of driving technical strategy and influencing decisions across multiple teams
• Strong ownership mindset—you see problems through from identification to resolution
• Rigorous engineering practices with a focus on correctness, testing, and operational excellence
• Excellent communication skills; ability to represent engineering to leadership and stakeholders

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 accomodations@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.