Join Rippling's Engineering team as a Staff Software Engineer and be at the forefront of building core AI Platform infrastructure. This pivotal role will power intelligent and automated experiences across our entire product suite, encompassing background agents, sophisticated workflows, evaluation systems, data pipelines, and model-quality loops. You will also contribute to sandboxing, scaling, latency optimization, and reliability improvements, laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Rippling is revolutionizing HR, IT, and Finance management for businesses worldwide. Our integrated platform streamlines payroll, benefits, expenses, and IT management, offering unparalleled automation across the employee lifecycle. From hiring to onboarding in 90 seconds, Rippling empowers companies with a single system to manage their workforce effectively.

We are a rapidly growing company, backed by top investors and recognized as a leading startup employer. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on our AI strategy and platform development.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will spearhead major AI Platform initiatives across backend, platform, and infrastructure domains. You will drive the design and execution of systems supporting agents, evals, automation, and data pipelines, ensuring scalability, reliability, and low latency. Acting as a technical lead for cross-functional efforts involving Product, Infra, Platform, and AI teams, you will translate ambiguous technical challenges into clear architectural and execution plans.

Your responsibilities include writing and reviewing production code, debugging critical paths, and making implementation-level decisions. You will build reusable platform systems that empower other product teams across Rippling. Furthermore, you will elevate our engineering standards through rigorous design and code reviews, mentoring junior engineers, and providing technical guidance. Balancing speed, quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability will be key to your success.

We are seeking experienced software engineers with 10-15 years of experience, ideally in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or AI platforms. A strong hands-on coding ability is essential, with a willingness to remain deeply involved in debugging, design reviews, and implementation details.

Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C# is required. Proven experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production is crucial. We value candidates with strong system design and architecture fundamentals, covering APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and production operations.

This role requires the ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives without formal authority and to connect technical decisions with customer and business impact. Practical exposure or a strong curiosity towards AI agents, LLM infrastructure, ML/data infrastructure, and automation systems is highly desirable. Experience in high-growth startup environments is a significant plus.