Senior Software Engineer- Payroll Data

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. Why This Role Rare Opportunity Rippling is looking for a seasoned Senior Software Engineer to join the Payroll Data team, one of the most foundational teams in the Global Payroll organization. While other teams build features on top of payroll data, this team defines what that data looks like and how it gets materialized — decisions that shape the capabilities and constraints of the entire payroll product. In this role, you will design and evolve the core payroll data models that represent earnings, deductions, taxes, and employer costs across dozens of countries. You'll architect materialization pipelines that transform payroll events into consistent, queryable datasets consumed by reporting, analytics and compliance. You'll define data contracts and interfaces that multiple teams depend on, and you'll make principled trade-offs between model expressiveness, query performance, and operational simplicity. This is an opportunity to do work with deep technical leverage: a well-designed data model or a faster materialization pipeline doesn't just improve one feature — it improves every feature built on top of it. What You Will Do Own the design and evolution of payroll data models spanning earnings, deductions, taxes, contributions, and employer costs across 40+ countries, balancing correctness, extensibility, and query performance. Architect and scale materialization pipelines that transform raw payroll events and configurations into consistent, query-ready datasets for reporting, analytics, filings, and compliance. Define and maintain data contracts between the payroll data layer and its consumers — run management, tax engine, filings, object graph, RQL, and finance reporting — ensuring stability and clarity at every integration boundary. Tackle hard data modeling problems including temporal state management, multi-country regulatory variation, and bitemporal data patterns. Drive performance optimization across materialization and query paths, ensuring payroll data is available with the latency, freshness, and correctness guarantees that downstream systems require. Improve observability and operational tooling for data pipelines — monitoring for drift, staleness, schema violations, and materialization failures in a system where incorrect data has direct financial consequences. Lead cross-team technical discussions on data model changes, schema evolution, and materialization strategies that affect multiple payroll teams. Mentor engineers and raise the team's standards for data modeling rigor, pipeline reliability, testing, and documentation. Shape the long-term data architecture by working with stakeholders across payroll, platform, and analytics to anticipate new country launches, product features, and reporting requirements. What You Will Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on data modeling, data pipelines, or data platform work. Deep experience designing data models for complex, real-world domains — you think carefully about normalization, temporal state, schema evolution, and t