Senior Software Engineer - AI Initiative

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 $1.8B+ 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 AI Platform Team

The AI Platform team is one of Rippling’s highest-priority engineering investments and sits at the center of the company’s broader AI strategy. The team is building the foundational infrastructure that powers AI capabilities across Rippling’s entire product ecosystem, including HR, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, IT, Finance, Compliance, and Workforce Management. Rather than building standalone chatbots or simple LLM integrations, the team focuses on creating deeply integrated AI systems that understand Rippling’s rich business context, permissions model, workflows, and enterprise data.

The team is developing core platform capabilities such as AI agents, workflow automation engines, evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, data pipelines, and self-healing systems that can identify issues, surface insights, and help automate complex enterprise workflows. These systems operate with real business context, approvals, permissions, and auditability requirements, enabling customers to safely delegate operational tasks while maintaining control and governance.

One of the unique aspects of Rippling AI is that it is built directly on top of Rippling’s unified data model and permission system. The platform can reason across HR, IT, Payroll, and Finance data while respecting access controls and providing verifiable outputs. The team is solving challenging problems around agent orchestration, workflow execution, reliability, permissions, evaluations, observability, data quality, and scalable AI infrastructure.

This is an ideal environment for engineers who enjoy building large-scale backend and platform systems, working through ambiguity, and owning products end-to-end. Engineers on the team are highly hands-on, spend the majority of their time coding, and have the opportunity to shape how AI becomes a core part of enterprise software. The role offers significant ownership, visibility, and a strong path toward Staff-level engineering scope over time.

What you will do:

• Build foundational AI platform systems that support Rippling’s broader AI strategy across HR, IT, Finance, payroll, benefits, recruiting, compliance, and internal workflows.
• Work as a deeply hands-on Senior Software Engineer, with around 60% of time expected to be spent coding, debugging, reviewing code, and owning implementation.
• Contribute to the design and build-out of AI platform capabilities such as background agents, automated workflows, evaluation systems, data pipelines, and model quality feedback loops.
• Help build systems that allow AI agents to automate repetitive enterprise workflows with the right permissions, controls, approvals, and auditability.
• Work on platform systems that support self-healing and self-improving workflows, where AI can detect negative product signals and help identify root causes.
• Partner with Staff Engineers, Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders to convert ambiguous product/platform problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Own well-defined to moderately ambiguous components end-to-end — from design and implementation to testing, launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Participate actively in design discussions, code reviews, debugging, production support, and operational improvements.
• Build reliable, scalable, and maintainable backend/platform systems that can support Rippling’s product ecosystem.

What’s exciting about this role:

• This is not a generic chatbot or lightweight LLM wrapper role. The team is building core AI platform inf…