Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

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 $1.85B 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 official communication will only be sent from @ Rippling.com addresses. About the role Rippling is growing exceptionally fast and we have a 1000+ person engineering team that ships code dozens of times every day. This role is for the Developer Experience team that manages a variety of foundational systems like CI/CD, Development environments and staging/demo environments! It is a high leverage and high visibility role which will have a direct impact on Rippling’s shipping velocity. What You'll Do Drive technical leadership by owning and delivering large-scale, cross-team initiatives with high levels of ambiguity and complexity, ensuring measurable business impact. Shape engineering strategy by collaborating with peers and leaders to align on long-term goals and translating them into execution plans within your function. Elevate system design & architecture by implementing flexible, reusable, and future-proof solutions, while anticipating failure modes and addressing them proactively. Lead incident management and debugging efforts across unfamiliar systems, acting as an incident commander when necessary, and eliminating systemic technical debt. Champion security and reliability by leading threat modeling exercises, embedding best practices, and designing processes to mitigate systemic vulnerabilities. Mentor and grow talent by guiding engineers across teams, driving knowledge-sharing through talks and documentation, and contributing to hiring as a recruiting marshal. Influence stakeholders by synthesising product, design, and business needs into compelling technical solutions that balance short-term delivery with long-term success. Qualifications 10–15+ years of proven experience as a Backend/Infrastructure Software Engineer, with demonstrated impact at scale. Strong expertise in building distributed, resilient systems and driving technical decisions across teams. Bonus: Experience with DevEx (CI/CD/Docker/test frameworks) or Cloud technologies (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, MongoDB). Bonus: Proficiency in Python or GoLang. Passion for improving developer productivity, system scalability, and long-term technical excellence. Additional Information Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accomodations@rippling.com Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an es