Staff Software Engineer - Financial Ledger Systems

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 Rippling processes multi-billions of dollars in annual transaction volume, serving as the financial engine for businesses worldwide. As a Staff Engineer on the broader Financial Services team, you will join a lean, high-impact group responsible for the architecture that moves this money. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to anchor our new Money Movement & Treasury architecture hub in Seattle. You will own the design and implementation of our deterministic, config-driven, and incrementally testable ledger architecture. You will be the technical authority ensuring 100% ledger coverage to act as the final guardrail for all tax and payment liabilities. What you will do Architect the Foundation: Redesign our General Ledger and reconciliation systems to eliminate silent failures and to be deterministic. Unify the Abstraction: Establish universal primitives across various historically disjointed payment systems to create a single, queryable lifecycle for every dollar moving through our platform. Build the Engine: Develop a reconciliation replay and testing framework, working closely with the payments data team to replace legacy Snowflake-side recon logic. Technical Leadership: Anchor the Seattle site, mentoring a pod of high-performing Senior engineers to build an execution layer decoupled from product feature velocity. Cross Functional Execution: The engineer will work closely and collaborate with the Payments Data, Tax, and Accounting team to understand ledger, tax liability, accounting and regulatory reporting requirements, and to replace legacy Snowflake-side reconciliation logic by developing a reconciliation replay and testing framework. What you will need Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record in backend development and distributed systems. Architecture: Proven ability to design large-scale, fault-tolerant systems from scratch. You understand the trade-offs between consistency and availability and know when "eventual consistency" is not enough. High Agency: You thrive in ambiguity. You don't wait for a ticket to be assigned; you identify the business problem, scope the technical solution, and execute. Domain Agility: You have the intellectual curiosity to master the complex domain of treasury and money movement in a matter of days, even if you don't have a background in it. Tech Stack: Deep proficiency in a modern backend language (Python, Go, Java, etc.) plus experience with complex data modeling (SQL/NoSQL) and data processing framework (Spark/Flink). 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 reaso