Senior Backend Engineer, Financial AI Platform

rippling; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling’s Financial AI Product Team is building AI-driven financial workflows that span payroll, payments, reconciliation, and compliance for modern businesses. As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll shape how AI and deterministic systems intersect, delivering production-grade capabilities with high reliability and auditable controls.

You will prototype quickly, scale successful ideas into reusable primitives, and partner with product, design, operations, compliance, and platform teams to drive

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at meaningful scale.
• Experience designing backend systems, data models, APIs, workflows, or platform infrastructure for complex business domains.
• Strong judgment around reliability, correctness, edge cases, and operational risk.
• Interest in applied AI, LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction, or AI-assisted workflows.
• Ability to reason clearly about where AI should be used, where deterministic systems should take over, and how to build guardrails around model-driven workflows.
• Product sense and comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where the right answer is not obvious upfront.
• Ability to partner with product managers, domain experts, operations teams, and engineers to turn messy real-world workflows into simple, scalable software.
• A high-ownership mindset: you can take a problem from vague customer pain through architecture, implementation, rollout, measurement, and iteration.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-powered product capabilities for complex financial workflows such as onboarding, data ingestion, reconciliation, validation, exception handling, and operational review.
• Design systems that combine model-driven reasoning with deterministic financial execution.
• Build workflows that trace financial values back to source evidence, surface unresolved gaps, and prevent downstream execution when validation fails.
• Create ingestion and normalization systems that can handle messy exports, historical records, customer-provided files, and inconsistent provider formats.
• Develop evals, testing harnesses, observability, and feedback loops to measure AI quality in workflows where “almost always right” is not good enough.
• Partner closely with product, design, operations, compliance, and platform teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities and turn them into reliable product capabilities.
• Work through ambiguous product areas, prototype quickly, and scale successful solutions into reusable product and platform primitives.
• Help set the engineering bar for correctness, auditability, security, reliability, and production safety in AI-enabled and new AI native financial products.

Skills

Software engineering

Backend design

Reliability

Applied AI

Guardrails

Ownership

Cross-functional collaboration

Product sense

Job description

Rippling’s Financial AI Product Team is building AI-driven financial workflows that span payroll, payments, reconciliation, and compliance for modern businesses. As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll shape how AI and deterministic systems intersect, delivering production-grade capabilities with high reliability and auditable controls.

You will prototype quickly, scale successful ideas into reusable primitives, and partner with product, design, operations, compliance, and platform teams to drive