Director of Developer Tools & Observability

Rippling; San Francisco, Seattle, New York (CA, WA, NY); On-site; USD 260,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

In-office policy

Job summary

Rippling's Infrastructure organization owns foundational systems powering products and millions of users. The Tools and Observability team builds internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure to help engineers develop, operate, and troubleshoot services at scale.

This role leads and grows a team, defines the long-term strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability, and drives adoption of shared tools while ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience.
• Experience leading teams that build internal developer tools, shared engineering platforms, or observability infrastructure.
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems and cloud-based production environments.
• Experience building or operating logging, metrics, tracing, or error-monitoring systems at scale.
• A strong developer experience mindset with the ability to translate engineering needs into intuitive tools.
• Strong operational judgment, including experience improving production troubleshooting, alerting, and incident response.
• Experience developing senior engineers, Staff Engineers, and Principal Engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team responsible for Rippling’s internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure.
• Define the long-term technical strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability.
• Build and evolve internal tools and self-service capabilities that simplify how engineers develop, troubleshoot, and operate services.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and usability of logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and error-monitoring systems.
• Partner with engineering teams to understand their needs, prioritize improvements, and drive adoption of shared tools and platforms.
• Establish best practices for instrumentation, actionable alerting, and production debugging.
• Lead initiatives across engineering organizations that improve developer workflows and reduce operational overhead.
• Develop and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong culture of ownership and technical excellence.
• Drive improvements in observability coverage, platform performance, and cost efficiency.

Skills

Team leadership

Distributed systems

Observability tooling

Developer tooling

Job description

Rippling's Infrastructure organization owns foundational systems powering products and millions of users. The Tools and Observability team builds internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure to help engineers develop, operate, and troubleshoot services at scale.

This role leads and grows a team, defines the long-term strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability, and drives adoption of shared tools while ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost