Product Lead, Payments

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 153,000 - 255,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Product Lead to own our payments experience and orchestration platform from strategy to execution. You will decide how money moves, where it moves, and how fast, covering methods, funding, routing, and new rails for multiple countries and entities.

You will define agentic payments, enable Rippling AI to understand configuration and state, and ensure safe, scalable actions within controls.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management, product lead, or founding experience.
• Demonstrated success owning technically complex platform products or shared infrastructure.
• Strong systems thinking across data models, states, rules, permissions, exceptions, integrations, and operational processes.
• Excellent product judgment, with ability to connect infrastructure work to simple customer experiences.
• Technical fluency and curiosity; comfortable with APIs and system architecture.
• Experience with payments, fintech, treasury, banking infrastructure, risk, or other regulated financial systems is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Build a simple, consistent payment-method experience across Rippling, including bank-account setup, validation, verification, eligibility, funding methods, readiness, history, and controls.
• Evolve routing architecture to support flexible money flows, multiple routes and FX providers, real-time payments, and new product use cases.
• Define and launch flows of funds for new countries, licensed entities, financial products, and banking partners.
• Make money move faster by enabling accelerated and instant payment experiences across Rippling products.
• Build foundation for agentic payments by making payment methods, routing options, lifecycle state, and actions machine-readable; enable Rippling AI to answer questions and safely act within controls.
• Use AI to make payments network more intelligent, anticipate funding/payout issues, optimize routes, and automate decisions.
• Manage the economics of money movement by owning payments P&L, FX, fees, routing costs, and float income.
• Partner with Engineering and Design on data models, lifecycle state, routing logic, APIs, and customer workflows.
• Work cross-functionally with Treasury, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Operations, Support, and product leaders.

Skills

Product management

Platform products

Systems thinking

Analytical skills

Technical fluency

Cross-functional collaboration

Decision making

Tools

APIs

Job description

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 $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—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 the role

Rippling’s payments platform moves billions of dollars across countries, currencies, bank accounts, and payment rails to pay millions of workers each week. Our licensed global payments infrastructure gives Rippling’s financial products flexible and reliable ways to get people and businesses paid correctly and on time.

We are looking for a Product Lead to own our payments experience and orchestration platform. You will decide how money moves, where it moves, and how fast it moves at Rippling. Your scope includes payment methods, funding and payout options, flows of funds, routing, new countries and rails, payment speed, and the economics of our payments products.

You will also define what agentic payments look like at Rippling. You will enable AI to understand payment configuration and state, anticipate issues, evaluate routing options, explain tradeoffs, and safely take action to keep money moving.

This is a high-ownership role for a product leader who can move fluidly between customer experience and technical architecture, turning complex tradeoffs across speed, reliability, risk, regulation, and economics into simple products and durable platform abstractions.

What role do Product Managers play at Rippling? The product team owns Rippling’s product direction, defining what to build in order to solve customer problems in a way that allows them to succeed. We do this by intimately understanding the market, our customers, and the perspectives of our key stakeholders and synthesizing that into a product that is effective, efficient, and easy to use.

What you will do

• Build a simple, consistent payment-method experience across Rippling, including bank-account setup, validation, verification, eligibility, funding methods, readiness, history, and controls.
• Evolve Rippling’s routing architecture to support more flexible money flows, multiple routes and FX providers, real-time payments, changing settlement timelines, and new product use cases without bespoke integrations.
• Define and launch flows of funds for new countries, licensed entities, financial products, and banking partners.
• Make money move faster by enabling accelerated and instant payment experiences across Rippling products.
• Build the foundation for agentic payments by making payment methods, routing options, lifecycle state, and available actions machine-readable. Enable Rippling AI to answer payment questions, identify and explain issues, recommend the right resolution, and safely take action within defined controls.
• Use AI to make Rippling’s payments network more intelligent, including anticipating funding and payout issues, optimizing routes across speed, cost, and reliability, and automating operational decisions that currently require manual investigation.
• Manage the economics of money movement by owning the payments P&L, including FX, transaction fees, routing costs, and float income.
• Partner deeply with Engineering and Design, going into the technical details of data models, lifecycle state, routing logic, APIs, and customer workflows to produce high-quality solutions.
• Work cross-functionally with Treasury, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Operations, Support, and product leaders across Rippling.

What you will need

• 5+ years of product management, product lead, or founding experience.
• Demonstrated success owning technically complex platform products or shared infrastructure.
• Strong systems thinking across data models, states, rules, permissions, exceptions, integrations, and operational processes.
• Excellent product judgment, with the ability to connect deep infrastructure work to simple, intuitive customer experiences.
• Technical fluency and curiosity; you are comfortable working closely with engineers, reading technical specifications, understanding APIs and system architecture, and interrogating how a workflow behaves end to end.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and the ability to hold a lot of complicated concepts and ideas in your head at once.
• A track record of translating ambiguous, cross-functional problems into clear strategy, product requirements, and shipped outcomes.
• Experience with payments, fintech, treasury, banking infrastructure, risk, or other regulated financial systems is strongly preferred.
• Strong alignment with Rippling’s leadership principles, particularly “Push the limits of possible,” “Challenge each other directly,” and “Go and see.”

If you don’t necessarily meet all of these requirements, we still encourage you to apply. Skills transfer in unexpected ways, and diverse perspectives often lead to the most innovative solutions.

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email [e-mail]

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here .

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.

*Commission is not guaranteed

The pay range for this role is:

153,000 - 255,000 USD per year (US San Francisco Bay Area)