Senior Staff Software Engineer - 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 We’re hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to help shape the future of Rippling’s platform and AI infrastructure. This is a high-impact role for a distributed systems leader who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys solving complex technical problems, and wants to build foundational systems that power both Rippling’s developer ecosystem and next-generation AI experiences. Rippling’s Platform organization builds and operates the shared infrastructure that powers nearly every product across the company. Our systems support close to 1,000 engineers and are built on top of a dynamically stitched, user-permissioned ontology, a scalable object platform store, event-driven dependency systems, and Rippling Query Language (RQL). As AI becomes increasingly embedded across Rippling’s products, Platform Engineering is central to building the infrastructure that enables intelligent, secure, and deeply integrated AI experiences. From search and workflow orchestration to permissions-aware data systems and developer tooling, this role will help define how AI operates across live business systems at scale. We’re looking for a technical leader who can architect durable distributed systems, drive complex cross-functional initiatives, and raise the technical bar across the organization while remaining deeply hands-on in design and implementation. What you will do Act as a senior technical leader within Rippling’s engineering organization Architect and drive large-scale distributed systems and platform initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations Design highly scalable, reliable, and extensible platform services that power critical product experiences across Rippling Translate ambiguous technical and product requirements into durable, production-ready systems Drive technical strategy and influence architectural direction across the Platform organization Partner closely with senior engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders on strategic initiatives Improve engineering quality through technical mentorship, code reviews, design reviews, and operational leadership Own and deliver complex, high-impact technical projects end-to-end as the directly responsible individual (DRI) Help shape the future of AI-native infrastructure and developer tooling at Rippling Build systems that enable secure, permissions-aware, and highly reliable AI experiences operating on live company data Raise the bar for operational excellence, scalability, reliability, and engineering craftsmanship across the organization What you will need 10+ years of professional software engineering experience Deep expertise building and operating large-scale distributed systems Strong experience designing scalable platform infrastructure and shared services Proven ability to operate effectively in fast-paced, high-growth environments with significant ambiguity Strong architectural instincts and a track record of building durable technical abstractions Experience developing scalable core services and infrastructure used across many products and teams Expertis