Senior Backend Engineer, Fintech Payroll & Payments Equity

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

The role emphasizes country-agnostic primitives, reliable APIs, and high-integrity workflows, with mentorship and ownership expected across the team. This is a high-impact position within a fast-growing fintech platform.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering experience building scalable, production-grade systems.
• Experience designing distributed systems, APIs, data models, event-driven workflows, or financial infrastructure.
• Strong engineering judgment around failure modes, data integrity, observability, and operational response.
• Experience leading complex technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Interest in fintech or financial infrastructure; experience with payments, payroll, banking, tax, treasury, ledgers, reconciliation, or regulated systems is a plus.
• Familiarity with technologies such as Go, Python, TypeScript, React, Spark, Flink, MongoDB, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, or AWS is helpful, but not required.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale backend systems that power global payroll and payments infrastructure.
• Develop high-integrity systems for payroll calculations, filings, ledgers, payment orders, reconciliation, treasury, and risk controls.
• Create country-agnostic platform primitives that can support local tax, compliance, banking, and payroll requirements across many regions.
• Build APIs and integration layers that ingest complex customer, partner, payroll-provider, banking, and compliance data with strong correctness guarantees.
• Solve distributed-systems problems involving high-volume financial data, state transitions, retries, and integrations with banks, payroll providers, and regulatory partners.
• Partner closely with product, design, operations, compliance, payroll experts, and payments teams to turn ambiguous business problems into robust technical systems.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the engineering bar through technical design, code quality, operational rigor, and clear ownership.

Skills

Strong backend engineering

Distributed systems design

Data integrity & observability

Project leadership

Fintech domain interest

Cloud / infra familiarity

Tools

Go

Python

TypeScript

React

Spark

Flink

MongoDB

Kafka

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

Job description

The role emphasizes country-agnostic primitives, reliable APIs, and high-integrity workflows, with mentorship and ownership expected across the team. This is a high-impact position within a fast-growing fintech platform.