Senior 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, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil and Goldman Sachs —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.

Rippling PEO (Professional Employer Organization) and HR Services Overview

Rippling’s PEO (Professional Employer Organization) and HR Services products help founders and small businesses build faster — and succeed with lower failure rates. Together, they drive over $140M in annual revenue , forming a core pillar of Rippling’s business.

In the early years, these systems were built at breakneck speed to enable go-to-market growth — fueling massive adoption but introducing tech debt and tightly coupled designs.

Now in Phase L2 , the team is rebuilding the foundation into an extensible, use-case–driven architecture — transforming complex, hard-coded systems into scalable, modular platforms. You’ll play a key role in re-imagining the backbone of Rippling’s HR ecosystem — improving developer velocity, reducing operational friction, and unlocking new market opportunities.

Key Responsibilities

System Reliability : Enterprise-grade stability across global employment, benefits, and compliance workflows, with zero critical failures in employee lifecycle operations.

Extensibility : New employment models, jurisdictions, and compliance frameworks added with minimal engineering effort and zero downtime.

Performance : Significant reduction in workflow latency, data synchronization time, and operational overhead across distributed systems.

Developer Velocity : Modular, well-abstracted APIs and frameworks that empower internal teams to build on top of PEO systems without friction.

Business Impact : Faster onboarding for new countries and partners, reduced manual interventions, and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and retention.

Required Qualifications

14+ years of experience building large-scale, distributed systems in high-compliance or high-integrity domains (HR, Payroll, FinTech, or Insurance).

Deep expertise in domain-driven design , data modeling , and compliance-first architecture .

Experience scaling complex regulatory or multi-tenant systems , ideally spanning employment, benefits, or HR platforms.

Proficiency in designing extensible, modular service boundaries that maintain auditability and backward compatibility .

Strong understanding of policy enforcement, rule engines, and event-driven systems .

Ability to translate legal and operational complexity into elegant, maintainable engineering abstractions .

A hands-on architectural leader who can set technical direction, mentor teams, and drive large-scale transformations sustainably.

Bonus Points

Experience with compliance-as-code or policy automation frameworks.

Exposure to global employment , EOR , or multi-country workforce systems.

Familiarity with event sourcing , CQRS , and streaming architectures .

Contributions to open-source frameworks in HR, compliance, or distributed systems domains.

Why Rippling

Backed by world-class investors (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil, Goldman Sachs)

Valued among the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history

Built at the core of Rippling’s HR foundation, where global employment, compliance, and workforce management come together as one seamless system.

Join a team that pushes the limits of possible , builds winning systems, and moves fast with conviction.