Staff Software Engineer

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 $1.85B+ 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: The Data Catalog team is the semantic intelligence layer of Rippling's platform. Our mission is to make Rippling's data schema — spanning millions of fields across every product — discoverable, trustworthy, and actionable for both humans and AI. We are the authoritative source of truth for "data about data" within Rippling. We sit at the intersection of platform infrastructure and AI, powering core product surfaces like Workflow Automator, Reports, Supergroups, and Data Manager, while increasingly serving as the data backbone for Rippling's AI products — including the AI Assistant and AI Field Selection features. What We Build The team delivers across four strategic pillars: Data Discoverability: Catalog browse, search, and field-selection experiences used throughout Rippling, enabling users to find the most relevant data for their use case across a vast and growing schema. Data Enrichment: AI-generated semantic descriptions, glossary tagging, sampled values, usage signals, and RQL formula examples — adding business context that makes raw schema meaningful. Data Governance: PII classification, sensitive data flagging, compliance tagging, and integration with access controls and auditing infrastructure. Data Lifecycle: Upstream and downstream dependency tracking, lineage visualization, and event-driven metadata sync to ensure the Catalog stays live and accurate as Rippling's data model evolves. You will: Lead the Technical Roadmap: Design, develop, and maintain internet-scale, highly distributed systems and scalable services for the Data Catalog team. 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 Data Catalog’s core infrastructure evolves. Qualifications: 8+ years of experience in software development, preferably in fast-paced, dynamic environments. Solid understanding of CS fundamentals, architectures, and design patterns. Proven track record in building large-scale applications, APIs, and developer tools. Excellent at cross-functional collaboration, able to articulate technical concepts to non-technical partners. You thrive in a product-focused environment and are passionate about making an impact on customer experience. 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 l