Staff Software Engineer - Payroll Products

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 $1.8B 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 Role Rippling is seeking a **Staff Software Engineer** for the **Payroll Employment Products** team. This team is a horizontal powerhouse, owning the end-to-end payroll experience for PEO, EOR, and Standard Payroll, products driving **$250M+ in ARR** .

As a Staff Engineer, you are a technical leader for the entire suite of payroll employment products. You will be responsible for the architecture of highly complex, multi-country payroll domains. Your unique challenge is to leverage and extend Rippling’s existing platform components, working cross-functionally to “push” the platform to support the high-growth needs of our employment products.

Key Responsibilities **Technical Leadership & Architecture**

• Architect, develop, and maintain large-scale, distributed systems and scalable services for the Payroll products
• Set the direction for engineering best practices and technology adoption.
• Guide and support engineers, fostering a culture of learning and technical excellence.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to align on goals and ensure successful project outcomes.
• Actively contribute to and improve core platform components. You will partner with platform teams to ensure their roadmaps support the scaling requirements of the Employment Products team.
• Architect systems capable of supporting millions of users, ensuring performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Establish robust observability practices, including monitoring, logging, and tracing.
• Maintain standards and comprehensive documentation for system architecture and operations.
• Partner with Product, Operations, and other engineer teams with-in or outside the organisation to drive the team’s roadmap and project outcomes.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence. As a senior leader in a newly formed team, you will provide critical mentorship to junior and senior engineers alike.
• Maintain a high bar for code quality by engaging in coding and code reviews in Python, Golang, or Java.

Qualifications

• Experience: 9+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a Staff or Lead role focused on architecture and systems design.
• Technical Expertise: Proficient in coding with languages such as Python, Golang, and Java. Deep understanding of distributed computing principles, data architecture, and scalable system design.
• Distributed Systems: Deep proficiency in backend development and scaling high-throughput, real-time systems.
• Influence: Ability to collaborate with and influence teams outside of your direct reporting line to achieve shared technical goals.
• Consumer-Facing Product Development: Experience working on consumer-grade applications with a focus on intuitive user experiences.