Senior Engineering Manager, Object 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 Rippling's Object Platform is the foundation upon which every product in the company is built. The team owns the core frameworks that define how business data is modeled, connected, queried, and extended across Rippling. At the center of this platform is Universal Objects — the underlying framework that powers all transactional data in the system. Every employee, company, benefit, device, application, workflow, and customer-defined object ultimately builds on these primitives. The team is responsible for the evolution of Rippling's object store, object graph, ontology framework, query infrastructure (RQL), customer-defined object platform, and the developer capabilities that enable both internal teams and external partners to build applications on top of Rippling's data model. Together, these systems create a unified, permission-aware platform that powers automation, reporting, workflows, approvals, integrations, and every major product across the company. We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within this organization and help shape the future of Rippling's platform architecture. This is a highly technical leadership role focused on large-scale distributed systems, data modeling frameworks, developer platforms, and systems-of-record infrastructure that serve hundreds of engineers and millions of end users. What you will do Lead and grow a high-performing team responsible for foundational platform infrastructure used across every Rippling product Define the technical strategy and roadmap for core platform capabilities including object modeling, schema frameworks, query systems, metadata services, and developer tooling Drive the evolution of Universal Objects, the framework that powers transactional data across Rippling Partner closely with engineering leaders across the company to build platform capabilities that unlock leverage for hundreds of engineers Deliver scalable, reliable, and highly performant systems that serve as the foundation for workflows, reporting, approvals, automation, integrations, and application development Improve developer productivity through investments in platform abstractions, APIs, tooling, and self-service capabilities Maintain a high bar for system design, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence Mentor engineers and engineering leaders while fostering a culture of ownership, craftsmanship, and technical rigor Influence long-term architectural decisions across Rippling's data and platform ecosystem What you will need 8+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale backend or distributed systems 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams Experience building foundational platforms, frameworks, or systems used by other engineers Strong understanding of data modeling, metadata systems, object-oriented data abstractions, or systems-of-record architectures Experience operating and scaling highly available distributed systems Proven ability to lead complex cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple