Senior Engineering Manager

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

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact platform engineering team responsible for core infrastructure and product foundations used across Rippling. This role owns multiple horizontal charters, including Data Deletion, Webscripts, Internationalisation, and Rippling Config Service. These systems sit at the intersection of platform scalability, developer productivity, compliance, configuration management, and customer-facing product quality. The ideal candidate is a strong engineering leader who can operate across ambiguous problem spaces, partner deeply with product and infrastructure teams, and build durable systems that scale with Rippling's product surface.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of engineers working on critical platform charters.
• Own technical strategy and execution for Data Deletion, Webscripts, Internationalisation, and Rippling Config Service.
• Partner with product, design, compliance, security, and infrastructure teams to define roadmaps and delivery plans.
• Drive architecture reviews and ensure systems are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and secure.
• Establish clear ownership, operational excellence, and engineering quality across multiple platform surfaces.
• Balance short-term product needs with long-term platform investments.
• Mentor senior engineers and engineering leads, helping them grow their technical judgment and leadership.
• Improve execution rigor through planning, prioritization, metrics, incident reviews, and continuous process improvement.
• Represent the team in cross-functional forums and communicate tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years managing engineering teams.
• Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer productivity, or shared product-surface teams.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to reason about distributed systems, data models, APIs, reliability, and scale.
• Proven ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional charters with multiple stakeholders.
• Experience managing senior engineers and driving alignment across teams.
• Strong execution discipline: roadmap planning, project delivery, operational metrics, and incident follow-through.
• Ability to balance product velocity with long-term platform quality.
• Clear written and verbal communication, especially around tradeoffs and technical strategy.

Nice To Have

• Experience with privacy, compliance, data lifecycle, or data deletion systems(GDPR, CCPA).
• Experience building internal platforms or frameworks used by many product teams.
• Experience with internationalisation/localisation systems.
• Experience with configuration platforms, feature/config rollout systems, or policy/config management.
• Experience with low-code, scripting, workflow, or extensibility platforms.

Why This Role Matters

This team builds foundational systems that many Rippling products depend on. The role requires someone who can think like a platform owner: creating leverage for other teams, reducing duplication, improving reliability, and ensuring that core systems continue to scale as Rippling grows across products, countries, and customer segments.

About You

You are a hands-on engineering leader who enjoys operating at both technical and organizational levels. You can dive into architecture when needed, but your real strength is creating clarity, building strong teams, and helping engineers deliver high-quality systems in complex environments.