Join Rippling and revolutionize how businesses manage HR, IT, and Finance. We offer a unified platform for all workforce systems, streamlining operations from payroll and benefits to IT and finance. Our innovative solution allows for complete employee lifecycle management within a single system, making complex tasks like global onboarding achievable in minutes.

Rippling is a rapidly growing San Francisco-based company, backed by top-tier investors and recognized as a leading startup employer. We are committed to candidate safety and ensure all official communications originate from @Rippling.com email addresses.

Our Global Payroll division is at the forefront of tackling complex technical and operational challenges. We build sophisticated systems that enable companies to manage international payroll with accuracy, compliance, and seamless integration across various HRIS, benefits, and financial workflows. Customers depend on our high-accuracy, compliance-sensitive solutions for payroll calculation, employee change management, local tax handling, reporting, and downstream system syncing.

Define and advance the long-term architecture for Global Payroll systems, ensuring robust support for multi-country payroll, country-specific regulations, local currency transactions, approvals, reporting, and integrations.

Spearhead complex, cross-functional technical initiatives that integrate payroll, HRIS, time tracking, benefits, finance, compliance, and accounting systems.

Design enduring platform abstractions that enable Rippling to scale payroll capabilities across diverse jurisdictions without resorting to fragmented, brittle implementations.

Enhance the reliability, observability, auditability, and operational resilience of payroll systems critical for accurate and timely employee payments.

Make informed technical trade-offs in systems where correctness, compliance, latency, maintainability, and speed of product development are paramount.

Proactively identify and mitigate architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, and operational risks across the Global Payroll platform.

Collaborate with product and business leaders to translate customer needs, regulatory complexities, and business strategies into actionable technical direction.

Mentor and elevate engineers across teams through rigorous design and code reviews, dedicated technical coaching, and the establishment of clear engineering standards.

A minimum of 15 years of comprehensive software engineering experience, ideally focused on backend development, platform engineering, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering.

Demonstrated success operating at a Senior Staff, Principal, or Staff+ technical scope, with a proven ability to drive significant technical initiatives.

Possess a deep, hands-on engineering foundation, excelling in coding, debugging, system design, and building robust, scalable systems.

Proficiency in at least one backend/general-purpose programming language, such as Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.

Extensive experience in building and operating large-scale production systems, understanding the nuances of high-availability environments.

Strong architectural and system design expertise across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance optimization.

Capability to independently own ambiguous, cross-functional, and multi-team technical initiatives from inception to completion.

Exhibit strong technical judgment and the acumen to effectively balance speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Possess the ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without relying on formal authority.

A strong mentorship philosophy with a documented history of elevating the technical capabilities of other engineers.

Comfort and effectiveness operating within fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.

Excellent communication skills, adept at clearly articulating complex technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.