Rippling is revolutionizing how businesses manage HR, IT, and Finance by integrating scattered workforce systems into a single, powerful platform. Our innovative approach automates the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring and onboarding to payroll, benefits, and IT provisioning.

We are recognized as one of America's best startup employers and have secured significant funding from top-tier investors. Located in San Francisco, CA, we are now expanding our AI Platform team.

This role focuses on building foundational AI infrastructure that will drive intelligent automation across Rippling. You will be instrumental in developing background agents, sophisticated workflow systems, evaluation frameworks, robust data pipelines, and scalable model deployment solutions. This is an opportunity to shape the future of AI at Rippling.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the AI Platform team, you will be a hands-on technical leader. You will tackle complex and ambiguous platform challenges, guiding cross-functional initiatives from conception to delivery.

Key responsibilities include: - Leading major AI Platform initiatives across backend development, infrastructure, and AI-enhanced systems. - Designing and implementing systems for agents, evaluations, automation, data pipelines, model quality assurance, sandboxing, scaling, latency, and reliability. - Providing technical leadership and collaborating with Product, Infrastructure, Platform, AI, and Engineering teams. - Deconstructing intricate technical problems into actionable architectural plans and execution strategies. - Writing and reviewing production code, debugging critical issues, and making key implementation decisions. - Developing reusable platform systems to empower multiple product teams across Rippling. - Elevating engineering standards through rigorous design and code reviews, mentorship, and technical guidance. - Striking an optimal balance between development speed, code quality, system reliability, and long-term platform maintainability.

We are seeking a seasoned Staff Software Engineer with 10-15 years of experience, ideally in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or product engineering.

Essential qualifications include: - Strong, hands-on coding proficiency, with a commitment to staying deeply involved in code, debugging, design reviews, and implementation. - Expertise in at least one major programming language, such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#. - Proven track record of building and managing large-scale distributed systems in production environments. - Experience within high-growth or hyper-growth startup or product environments is highly desirable. - Solid understanding of system design and architecture principles, including APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and production operations. - Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives effectively, even without formal authority. - Strong product sense and the capacity to align technical decisions with customer needs and business objectives. - A passion for mentoring engineers and enhancing technical capabilities while remaining an active coder. - Practical exposure to or a strong interest in AI agents, LLM infrastructure, agentic workflows, ML/data infrastructure, inference pipelines, evaluation systems, fine-tuning, or automation systems.