Staff Software Engineer - Global Payroll

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 $1.35B 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 Team

The Payroll Run Management team is the automation engine powering Rippling’s Global Payroll operations. We ensure millions of employees across 40+ countries get paid accurately and on time through automated systems.

We own the complete payroll run lifecycle (a payroll run is a batch process that calculates and processes payroll for a group of employees for a specific pay period) - from automatic creation to final processing. Our systems orchestrate complex payroll scenarios (regular runs, terminations, corrections, severance) across different countries, currencies, and compliance requirements. We also manage multiple internal integrations with HRIS systems, Filings, Benefits and other internal payroll components to ensure seamless data flow and processing.

We’ve built intelligent automation that runs 24/7, processing payroll with minimal manual intervention while maintaining strict compliance and audit requirements. We’re a mission-critical team where reliability is paramount - every line of code directly impacts people’s livelihoods. We solve fascinating problems at the intersection of financial systems, international compliance, and large-scale automation, building fault-tolerant pipelines that handle complex scenarios while scaling globally.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Architecture and Development: Design and implement scalable, high-performance systems to process large-scale compensation data and performance metrics.
• Own Data Pipelines: Architect and build efficient, real-time data pipelines that ensure accurate, timely, and secure compensation calculations.
• Scale Distributed Systems: Develop and optimize distributed systems that handle high-throughput data processing and analytics.
• Drive Technical Excellence: Set best practices for code quality, security, and system reliability.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Product, Design, and other Engineering teams to define and execute on the product roadmap.
• Mentor and Influence: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, fostering a high-performance team culture.

Qualifications

• Experience: 9+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a role leading architecture, designing consumer facing products and building systems.
• Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in backend development, distributed systems, and large-scale data pipelines.
• Data Pipeline Experience: Hands-on experience with data processing frameworks
• Scalability and Performance: Deep knowledge of building and scaling real-time, high-throughput systems.
• Consumer-Facing Product Development: Experience working on consumer-grade applications with a focus on intuitive user experiences.
• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and debugging skills with a passion for solving complex technical challenges.
• Communication: Ability to convey technical concepts to both engineering and non-engineering audiences effectively.