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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 expanding upmarket to serve larger enterprises and new international jurisdictions.
The Payroll Calculation team owns the systems that determine earnings, deductions, taxes, loans, garnishments, pensions, contributions, and jurisdiction-specific payroll logic. These systems sit at the intersection of distributed systems, product engineering, compliance, data modeling, and customer experience. The team is building the technical foundation for payroll at global scale—designing calculation frameworks that are configurable, versioned, auditable, debuggable, and explainable while evolving architecture to support dramatically more volume and complexity.
You will lead architecture and technical strategy for Rippling's payroll calculation systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will write critical production code and lead from the front on high-impact initiatives. You will design frameworks that make payroll logic configurable, versioned, testable, explainable, scalable, and easy to debug. You will leverage AI to make payroll logic easier to build, validate, explain, and operate without compromising accuracy, auditability, or control. You will build systems supporting enterprise-scale payroll for large employers with complex legal-entity structures and approval workflows, help expand native payroll capabilities across new countries and jurisdictions, and drive improvements in distributed systems, database performance, caching, reliability, and operability. You will partner cross-functionally with product, design, payroll operations, HRIS, and other engineering teams to deliver end-to-end customer outcomes. You will mentor senior and mid-level engineers across payroll calculation areas such as platform, earnings, deductions, taxes, and jurisdiction-specific logic.
Rippling values in-office collaboration; office-based employees (those within a defined radius of a Rippling office) are expected to work in the office at least three days per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Staff-level experience designing and scaling complex production systems where correctness and auditability are critical
- Strong engineering fundamentals across architecture, data modeling, distributed systems, databases, caching, and reliability
- Track record of setting technical direction and leading complex initiatives across multiple teams
- Strong product judgment and ability to connect platform decisions to customer outcomes
- Excellent communication skills and comfort driving alignment across engineering, product, and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment where priorities and requirements evolve quickly
- Payroll experience is helpful but not required; we value engineers who have worked on other high-integrity domains where correctness, auditability, and customer trust are essential
