Director of Engineering - Infrastructure

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 378,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech company specializing in HR and IT solutions is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead technical initiatives. The ideal candidate will have over 10 years of software engineering experience and strong capabilities in influencing technology decisions. You will act as a technical leader, drive high-impact projects, and communicate complex ideas clearly. This position offers a competitive salary range of USD 216,000 – 378,000 per year, depending on experience.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years in technical leadership/management roles.
• Experience in a fast-paced devops environment.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical leader within the engineering organization.
• Identify and advocate for high-impact projects.
• Drive alignment on requirements for complex systems.

Skills

Technical leadership

Communication skills

Problem-solving

Cloud services

DevOps practices

Framework development

Tools

Python

Django

Golang

React

MongoDB

Kafka

Job description

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, such as 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.

About the Role

Rippling Infrastructure operates as a scaled team that owns and operates a variety of mission‑critical systems. The team supports close to 1,000 engineers building products and internal platforms at Rippling and delivers foundational parts of our internal technical infrastructure. Coverage includes Compute (Containers and Traffic), Data (Document, Object, Relational, Streaming), Observability, Internal Tools, DevX, CI/CD, and Application Frameworks. The team is distributed across the US, India, and Poland.

What You’ll Do

• Act as a technical leader within the engineering organization.
• Identify and advocate for high‑impact projects that involve multiple stakeholders across the organization.
• Transform ambiguous technical and organizational problem statements into actionable plans and execute them with the team.
• Drive alignment on requirements involving complex, interdependent systems related to internal development platforms, the infrastructure that underpins them, and the developer tools that support them.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in technical leadership/management roles.
• Preferred experience building framework and infrastructure solutions used by internal developers in a fast‑paced devops environment.
• Experience building or leading teams that have delivered tooling, compute infrastructure, and data infrastructure serving internal teams.
• Bonus points for experience in developer tooling and reliability.
• Preferred stack: Python, Django, Golang, React, MongoDB, Trino, Pinot, Kafka, Postgres, AWS.
• Ability to thrive in an ambiguous environment by identifying areas of impact and pursuing them independently.
• Track record of influencing and enabling forward‑thinking technology decisions across a wide organization.
• Excellent ability to communicate complex technical ideas with clarity and precision in written and verbal modes.

Pay Range

USD 216,000 – 378,000 per year (US Tier 1).

Seniority Level

Director

Employment Type

Full‑time

Job Function

Engineering, Information Technology, and Project Management

Industries

Software Development