Principal Payroll Systems Architect

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 Rippling Payroll

Rippling Payroll is redefining how companies pay their people across the world — turning payroll from a cost center into a strategic advantage. Built on Rippling Unity — our unified workforce platform — Payroll connects HR, IT, and Finance so every policy, approval, and pay calculation automatically stays in sync across systems and countries.

With $750M+ ARR, >

23,000 customers, and >

$70B in annualized payroll volume, we’re building the most intelligent, automated, and compliant payroll infrastructure on the planet.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P10) to help architect and scale Rippling’s next-generation Global Payroll Platform — a system that powers payments, compliance, and computation for millions of employees across 50+ countries.

This role sits at the intersection of AI-powered automation , compliance-as-code , and massive scale — with direct ownership over core systems that define how Rippling processes global payroll, taxes, and payments at sub-second latency and near-zero error tolerance.

What You’ll Own

• Architect Rippling’s next-gen Payroll computation engine — modular, extensible, and capable of encoding multi-jurisdictional compliance logic declaratively.
• Design data models and pipelines that handle versioned pay runs, audit trails, retroactive corrections, and time-based computations at global scale.
• Build scalable rules engines to automate ever-changing tax, benefits, and labor laws across jurisdictions, ensuring compliance through dynamic, AI-generated logic.
• Modernize global payment infrastructure for real-time or near-instant disbursements while balancing reconciliation, fraud detection, and regulatory constraints.
• Evolve reporting and permissions systems to deliver real-time insights and granular access controls for complex, multi-entity organizations.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, and Finance teams to convert ambiguous regulatory specs into clear, deterministic system behavior.
• Lead high-impact initiatives like sandboxed “simulation” payrolls, AI-powered paystub explainability, and what-if analysis for enterprises.
• Shape the long-term platform vision , influencing 150+ engineers across Finance and HR Infrastructure as a multiplier, mentor, and architectural authority.

What Success Looks Like

What We’re Looking For

Bonus Points

Why Rippling