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Rippling is a unified HR, IT, and Finance platform that consolidates workforce systems—payroll, expenses, benefits, computers, and third-party integrations—into a single system. The company has raised $1.4B+ from top-tier investors and is headquartered in San Francisco.
The Global Payroll team builds technically complex systems that enable companies to pay employees across countries, currencies, entities, and local compliance regimes while maintaining tight integration with HRIS, benefits, time, finance, and accounting workflows. Customers depend on Global Payroll for high-accuracy, compliance-sensitive work: payroll calculation, employee changes, local deductions and taxes, payslips, reports, approvals, off-cycle runs, and downstream syncing to general ledger and accounting platforms.
The engineering challenge is building highly reliable, auditable, country-aware systems that scale across jurisdictions without fragmenting into local one-offs. This requires strong distributed-systems judgment, deep product thinking, operational excellence, and the ability to design abstractions that simplify complex payroll workflows for customers.
You will define and drive long-term architecture for Global Payroll systems supporting multi-country payroll, country-specific rules, local currency workflows, approvals, reporting, and integrations. You will lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives spanning payroll, HRIS, time, benefits, finance, compliance, and accounting. You will design durable platform abstractions that enable Rippling to launch and scale payroll capabilities across jurisdictions without brittle one-off implementations.
You will improve reliability, observability, auditability, and operational resilience of payroll systems customers depend on for accurate and timely pay. You will make pragmatic technical tradeoffs where correctness, compliance, latency, maintainability, and speed of product development all matter. You will identify and systematically reduce architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, and operational risk. You will partner with product and business leaders to translate customer needs, regulatory complexity, and business strategy into technical direction.
You will mentor and uplevel engineers across teams through design reviews, code reviews, technical coaching, and clear engineering standards. You will stay hands-on with implementation in critical, ambiguous, risky, or foundational areas. You will represent strong engineering judgment in planning, prioritization, incident review, and roadmap discussions.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering
- Proven experience operating at Senior Staff / Principal / Staff+ technical scope
- Deep hands-on engineering foundation with strong coding, debugging, design, and system-building experience
- Strong programming ability in one or more backend/general-purpose languages: Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#
- Experience building and operating large-scale production systems
- Strong architecture and system design depth across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance
- Ability to own ambiguous, cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end
- Strong technical judgment and ability to make tradeoffs across speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability
- Ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority
- Strong mentorship mindset with a track record of raising the technical bar for other engineers
- Comfortable operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies
- Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow engines, data platforms, or internal tooling
- Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, LLM systems, automation platforms, evaluation frameworks, or data-intensive systems
- Experience with reliability engineering, incident management, observability, performance tuning, and operational excellence
- Experience with security, compliance, permissions, auditability, or enterprise-grade systems
- Prior experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains
- Ability to operate as a "builder-leader" — someone who can define direction, align stakeholders, and stay close to execution
