Staff Software Engineer - Payments

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 Team The Tax Payment team is powering the tax remittance of $30 billion+ to 5000+ tax agencies. We ensure taxes are paid on the time. We ensure billions of tax payment across 40+ countries get get remitted on time through automated systems. We own the end to end lifecycle of tax remittance from salary payout to agency payment and refunds. Our system orchestrate complex tax remittance scenariosacross different countries, currencies, and compliance requirements. We've built intelligent engine to plan the tax remittance to maximize the float income and remitt taxes to 5000+ tax authorities without 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 evolve the core tax remittance product that moves $30B+ across 40+ countries and 5000+ tax agencies, with reliability and correctness as first principles. Own Tax Remittance Pipelines: Architect and build end-to-end pipelines that orchestrate the full lifecycle of tax payments — from salary payout to agency remittance and refunds — ensuring payments are timely, accurate, auditable, and compliant. Scale Distributed Payment Systems: Develop and optimize distributed systems that handle high-throughput, multi-currency tax remittances, agency cut-offs, retries, reconciliation, and failure recovery at global scale. Drive Technical Excellence: Set the bar for reliability, observability, security, and regulatory/audit readiness in a mission-critical domain where every deployment impacts people’s livelihoods. Cross-Team & External Collaboration: Partner closely with Payroll, Banking, Finance Ops, Compliance, and external payment partners/tax agencies to define roadmaps, de-risk launches, and unlock new geographies and products. Mentor and Influence: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across the org, influencing architecture, design reviews, and operational practices to build a high-performance, ownership-driven 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 challe