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.

About UI Platform

The UI Platform team is a foundational platform group responsible for raising the bar on technology, quality, performance, and reliability across Rippling's web and mobile applications. Our mission is to enable hundreds of product engineers across 30+ products to move fast without fragmenting the system or degrading critical paths. We do this by building and operating shared frameworks, full-stack platform services, and runtime infrastructure that become the default way UI is built at Rippling.

The team owns some of the highest-impact and highest-risk surfaces in the product — including App Shell, navigation, performance infrastructure, and configuration-driven platforms like SuperGrid and Flows. Small changes here can ripple across every application, which means we operate with a strong focus on modularity, isolation, governance, and enforcement, not just APIs and libraries. This is a team for engineers who enjoy working on foundations, care deeply about scale and correctness, and want their work to have org-wide leverage rather than local impact.

The opportunity

Rippling is building one of the largest and most complex SaaS platforms in the world, spanning HR, Finance, and IT.

As our product surface area and engineering organization continue to scale, platform reliability, performance, and consistency must be built into the system by default.

We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer (L9) to provide technical leadership for the backend and full-stack foundations of Rippling's UI Platform.

You will help evolve UI Platform into an end-to-end platform organization responsible for the services, configuration systems, orchestration layers, APIs, and runtime infrastructure that power consistent experiences across Rippling.

This is not a traditional frontend engineering role. We are looking for a strong backend and platform engineer with deep experience building large-scale systems using technologies such as Golang, Java, or Python.

You will own some of the most critical paths in the product while building foundational platforms that reduce fragmentation, improve reliability, and encode engineering best practices as defaults.

The role combines:

• Hands-on backend and platform engineering
• Org-level architectural authority
• Informal technical leadership and mentorship
• Cross-functional influence across engineering, product, design, and infrastructure

You will partner closely with Staff and Senior Staff engineers, Engineering Managers, and Directors across the Platform organization to shape how Rippling builds and operates product experiences for years to come.

What you'll own

• Architect and own foundational UI Platform services used across Rippling, including App Shell, Performance frameworks, and configuration-driven systems like SuperGrid and Flows.
• Define and enforce architectural boundaries and contracts that isolate critical paths from product code to reduce blast radius.
• Establish performance budgets, tooling and automated enforcement to detect and prevent performance and reliability regressions before they reach production.
• Drive the evolution of configuration-driven platforms that replace bespoke implementations with scalable, reusable foundations.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across UI Platform (30+ engineers) and influence the broader Platform org .
• Act as the architectural authority for UI Platform initiatives - setting direction, reviewing designs, and making high-impact technical decisions.
• Partner with Product, Design, Infra, and Backend teams to translate ambiguous requirements into durable platform abstractions.

What success looks like

• Org-level leverage: Product teams ship faster without re-implementing common patterns or unintentionally breaking critical paths.
• Performance & reliability: App Shell consistently meets defined SLAs for performance and reliability, with regressions caught automatically.
• Consistency at scale: Core UI behaviors (grids, editor, navigation, flows) behave predictably across the product.
• Platform adoption: New and existing teams adopt UI Platform services as defaults rather than building bespoke solutions.
• Technical leadership: Engineers across the org look to you for architectural guidance and platform direction.

What We're Looking For

• 15+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend, distributed, or platform systems.
• Deep programming experience in one or more backend languages such as Golang, Java, or Python.
• Strong fundamentals in backend architecture, including API design, data modelling, service boundaries, dependency management, concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure isolation.
• Proven experience building internal platforms or foundational systems used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience designing guardrails, validation systems, and automated enforcement mechanisms—not just publishing guidelines.
• Strong operational ownership, including observability, debugging, incident response, capacity planning, and production reliability.
• Experience leading complex architectural initiatives and large-scale migrations across multiple teams.
• Ability to influence engineering direction without relying on direct reporting authority.
• Comfortable balancing hands-on coding and technical execution with architecture, mentorship, and organizational leadership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly through design documents, RFCs, architecture reviews, and cross-team alignment.

Bonus Points

• Experience building configuration-driven platforms, workflow engines, orchestration systems, developer platforms, or low-code frameworks.
• Experience owning foundational platform systems adopted by hundreds of engineers or multiple product organizations.
• Background in safely migrating thousands of existing configurations, workflows, or application instances onto new platforms.
• Experience establishing performance budgets, reliability guardrails, platform governance, and automated architectural enforcement.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted developer tooling to accelerate migrations, automate refactoring, validate invariants, or review large-scale system changes.
• Familiarity with web or mobile application architecture and the backend infrastructure required to support complex user-facing platforms.