Lead Data Platform Engineer - Ingestion & APIs

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is assembling founding members for the Data Bridge team to build data systems powering ML models and new product lines. We aim to enable 500+ integrations and support HR, IT, and Benefits products.

You will own end-to-end data ingestion capabilities, build scalable infrastructure, and work with partners across Rippling’s product space. This role emphasizes operational excellence and architectural influence.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Significant leadership experience driving cross-functional projects.
• Expertise building complex distributed services with high availability and SLAs.
• Experience building large-scale APIs and developer tools.
• Strong CS fundamentals and architectural knowledge.
• Passion for product-focused environments with customer impact.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks like Spark or Flink.
• Bonus: integrations with 3rd party SaaS and AWS familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Lead mission-critical projects and end-to-end data ingestions with high quality.
• Own one or more products, APIs, or platform spaces.
• Work within central infrastructure to deliver scalable data ingestion systems and data lake architecture.
• Collaborate with partners and customers across domains for feedback.
• Ensure operational excellence and scale platform capabilities across Rippling products.
• Grow engineering skills and tackle hard technical problems.
• Influence architecture and technology choices across the company.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

API design

Backend development

AWS

Tools

Apache Spark

Flink

Observability tooling

Workflow orchestration

Job description

Rippling is assembling founding members for the Data Bridge team to build data systems powering ML models and new product lines. We aim to enable 500+ integrations and support HR, IT, and Benefits products.

You will own end-to-end data ingestion capabilities, build scalable infrastructure, and work with partners across Rippling’s product space. This role emphasizes operational excellence and architectural influence.