Director of App Platform & Developer Ecosystem

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Director of Product, App Platform to define the strategy for Rippling’s application platform and app ecosystem, including the Object Graph and Object Platform. The role requires turning complex platform architecture into a coherent developer product that developers love.

You will lead a team of product leaders, collaborate across engineering, design, and GTM, and drive AI-native app creation within a robust developer tooling stack.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of product management, engineering, platform, or technical product leadership experience.
• A track record of building substantial products for developers, such as developer platforms, APIs, infrastructure products, app platforms, marketplaces, or data platforms.
• Strong technical fluency across data models, APIs, permissions, systems boundaries, reliability, tooling, and developer workflows.
• Excellent product judgment and the ability to turn fragmented platform capabilities into a clear product strategy and roadmap.
• Experience leading product teams, hiring and developing PMs, and operating across executive, engineering, design, GTM, and customer-facing stakeholders.
• Comfort creating clarity in ambiguous, early, or newly elevated product areas.
• Nice to have: experience with third-party developer ecosystems, app marketplaces, AI-native development workflows, coding agents, object graphs, data clouds, or enterprise application platforms.

Responsibilities

• Set the App Platform strategy. Define how Rippling’s app primitives come together into a clear, scalable developer platform.
• Make developers the customer. Build APIs, schemas, permissions, tooling, documentation, observability, and lifecycle experiences that help developers build confidently.
• Lead the Object Graph and Object Platform roadmap. Shape the shared data and platform foundation that first-party teams, solutions teams, customers, and external developers build on.
• Enable AI-native app creation. Make the platform usable by AI coding agents through machine-readable interfaces and safe permissions.
• Build and lead the team. Hire, coach, and develop product leaders for a broad, technically complex product area.
• Drive ecosystem impact. Help scale custom apps and create a foundation for third-party developers to build and sell software on Rippling.

Skills

Leadership

Developer platforms

APIs

Data models

Reliability

Job description

Rippling is seeking a Director of Product, App Platform to define the strategy for Rippling’s application platform and app ecosystem, including the Object Graph and Object Platform. The role requires turning complex platform architecture into a coherent developer product that developers love.

You will lead a team of product leaders, collaborate across engineering, design, and GTM, and drive AI-native app creation within a robust developer tooling stack.