Staff Software Engineer - Events Platform

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 $1.4B+ 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 role The Events Platform team at Rippling builds the foundational infrastructure that powers a fully event-driven architecture across the company. As a core platform building block, the team enables systems to seamlessly emit, process, and react to events—unlocking critical capabilities like workflow automation, audit logging, and real-time product experiences. Operating at significant scale, the platform processes over a billion events per day and continues to grow at ~10% month over month, making it one of the most critical and high-impact systems within Rippling. In addition to providing core platform primitives and supporting engineering teams across the company, the team has also shipped Audit Log, a product that powers the auditing solution across Rippling. The team focuses on building highly reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly primitives that accelerate product development and ensure consistency across the ecosystem. What you will do Lead mission-critical projects and deliver data ingestions capabilities end-to-end with high quality Have clear ownership of one or many products, APIs or platform spaces Work within Rippling's central infrastructure team, responsible for delivering highly scalable distributed data ingestion systems, build a data lake architecture for various downstream systems to consume Get exposure to partners and customers in different business domains, who will help provide feedback for your product space Ensure operational excellence and scale the platform capabilities to serve many Rippling Products Build and grow your engineering skills in different challenging areas and solve hard technical problems Influence architecture, technology selections, and trends of the whole company What you will need 8+ years of professional work experience as a backend engineer Significant leadership experience driving complex cross-functional projects across teams, product managers, designers, etc Expertise in building complex distributed services with high availability and strict SLAs Experience building large-scale user-facing applications, APIs, and developer tools Strong CS fundamentals, and knowledge of architecture and common design patterns You’re passionate about being in a product-focused environment where everyone cares deeply about customer impact You have experience of running data processing pipelines in production using distributed data processing frameworks like Apache Spark or Flink. Bonus points if you’ve built integrations with 3rd party SaaS providers and workflow orchestration systems Bonus points if you’ve previously worked with AWS and have working knowledge of observability tooling 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