Staff Software Engineer - AI 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 At Rippling, we're not just building AI features, we're building an autonomous operating system for work. We're investing heavily in the next generation of enterprise AI: intelligent background automation, systems that monitor and improve themselves, and a custom intelligence layer built on Rippling's unique data and workflows. The opportunity is to make Rippling's products fundamentally smarter and more autonomous over time, not through one-off features, but through platform-level infrastructure that compounds. You'll be joining the team that recently launched Rippling AI, the fastest-growing product in Rippling's history. Every customer touchpoint, from onboarding to expense approvals to IT requests, is being rebuilt around agents, and the platform you build will be the foundation every AI surface at Rippling runs on. We're moving at startup speed with the reach of a category leader, and we're staffing this team like it's the most important bet at the company. As a Staff Engineer on AI Platform, you'll serve as a technical lead across multiple teams, own architecture for high-impact initiative areas, and lead cross-functional pods of engineers drawn from product, infra, and platform orgs. You'll work alongside some of the best engineers and product leaders at Rippling, with direct visibility to executive leadership. This is a deeply hands-on role where you'll be in the weeds of the code. What you will do Own end-to-end technical architecture for high-impact AI platform initiatives from design through production Lead a cross-functional pod of highly talented engineers, interacting with product, infra, and platform organizations Build scalable agent infrastructure that automates repetitive, high-frequency workflows across Rippling's product surface Design systems that are observable, self-correcting, and capable of improving over time with minimal human intervention Develop harness and platform capabilities that encode business logic and institutional knowledge into reliable, automated workflows Partner closely with Product to ensure AI-powered surfaces are trustworthy, controllable, and intuitive for end users and admins Mentor engineers across the org, establish best practices for AI platform development, and raise the technical bar broadly Track the frontier, translate model capability improvements into architectural decisions and move quickly when new approaches unlock better outcomes What you will need 8+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of technical leadership and org-wide impact Deep expertise in platform and distributed systems engineering — you've built reliable, observable, large-scale systems Strong hands-on coding skills, you are an active contributor in the codebase alongside your leadership responsibilities Experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives and driving alignment across multiple teams Strong product instincts, you translate ambiguous problems into durable platform capabilities and partner effectively with product teams Clear, pre