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 $1.4+B 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 official communication will only be sent from @ Rippling.com addresses. About the Role Rippling’s competitive advantage is the power of the platform and the Ripple Effect. A single change (like a promotion) can trigger thousands of downstream updates across IT, HR, and Finance. As our product suite grows, examining this data with a report, triggering a workflow, and permissioning that data becomes more and more valuable. As we launch the Rippling “App Store” we are working on the primitives to give to anyone the ability to build an app for themselves or others within Rippling—powered by AI. As a core member of the Platform team, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the architecture and future roadmap ground up to scale to enterprise level. Whether it’s designing new features and systems, crafting a stellar developer experience for internal and external developers, or optimizing system performance, you’ll play a pivotal role in furthering the heart of Rippling’s platform. What You Will Do Lead the Technical Roadmap: Own the roadmap for one of our architectural areas, whether it’s moving our dependency tracking system to a micro-batch/stream processing powerhouse or redesigning our lambda interface for scale. Think for the Future: Prototype with the newest AI tools to think about primitives that will be used to democratize development with Rippling. Solve for Scale: Tackle our growing size and load and understand where we can be doing less work. Own the Stack: Work deeply with infrastructure to manage complex distributed systems that power every Rippling product. Operate as a Tech Lead: This is a "pure engineering" team. You will partner directly with other Platform Tech Leads and EMs (your primary customers) to define how Rippling’s core infrastructure evolves. Qualifications 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on core platform teams. Deep Distributed Systems Expertise: You have built and scaled systems that handle high QPS (10k+) and high data throughput. Low-Level Enthusiast: You can dive into the details when needed to diagnose issue and can handle the technical depth Developer First: Everywhere you go, you create scripts, leave breadcrumbs, and think about how to make the developers around you succeed Language Agnostic: Proficiency in Python (or a strong desire to master it). 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 reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accomodations@rippling.com Rippling highly values in-office collaboration. Employees living within 30 miles of an office are expected to work onsi