Senior Distributed Systems Engineer, Payroll Orchestration

Rippling; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling in Seattle, WA, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and implement the distributed systems behind our core payroll engine for multiple countries. You will build scalable platforms using message queues, job flow systems, and bitemporal data models to ensure accurate payroll processing.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, emphasize observability, and drive high availability. The role requires deep experience with concurrency control, Temporal or Kafka, and modern

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Go and Python.
• Experience building scalable distributed systems and data pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of concurrency control and message ordering.
• Experience with message queues and job orchestration systems (Temporal, Kafka).
• Experience with transactional and analytical DBs (Mongo, PostgreSQL; Snowflake/ClickHouse).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement distributed systems with a platform mindset.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code.
• Demonstrate expertise in concurrency control and message ordering for payroll data.
• Utilize message queues and job flow systems (Temporal) to orchestrate payroll workflows.
• Develop efficient data pipelines for fast payroll data aggregates.
• Apply bitemporal data modeling to payroll data flows.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on goals and deliver projects.
• Implement observability with monitoring, logging, and tracing.
• Maintain high availability and reliability with strong SLAs.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Concurrency control

Messaging queues

Tools

Temporal

Kafka

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Snowflake

ClickHouse

Job description

Rippling in Seattle, WA, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and implement the distributed systems behind our core payroll engine for multiple countries. You will build scalable platforms using message queues, job flow systems, and bitemporal data models to ensure accurate payroll processing.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, emphasize observability, and drive high availability. The role requires deep experience with concurrency control, Temporal or Kafka, and modern