Senior Engineering Manager, Documents Platform

Socket.dev; San Francisco (WA, CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Documents Platform team. This role drives APIs, services, data models, and distributed systems that underpin document storage, workflows, and integrations across Rippling.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical vision, and partner with product teams to deliver scalable, reusable platform capabilities while ensuring reliability and developer experience.

Qualifications

• Significant engineering leadership experience.
• Strong backend engineering foundation with architecture experience.
• Experience building large-scale platforms used by multiple teams.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, databases, APIs, and scalable service architectures.
• Ability to design abstractions and reusable platform capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of backend/platform engineers for Rippling’s Documents Platform.
• Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for reusable document capabilities.
• Build scalable APIs and services for internal and external developers.
• Evolve document infrastructure into a generalized platform across products.
• Own complex technical decisions on distributed systems, data models, and storage.

Skills

Leadership

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API design

Architecture

People management

Collaboration

Job description

About the role

Rippling is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Documents Platform team. This team is building the foundational backend platform that enables document-centric experiences across Rippling—creating a flexible, scalable set of capabilities that can be used by our own product teams, AI-powered workflows, and, over time, third-party developers.

This is a high-impact platform leadership role. Rather than owning a single product surface, your team will build the APIs, services, data models, and distributed systems that make documents a first-class platform primitive across Rippling. The platform will support a broad range of use cases—from document storage and management to workflows involving generation, routing, completion, and signatures—while abstracting away the underlying complexity for the teams building on top of it.

You’ll lead a team of engineers while helping define the technical vision and evolution of the platform. The ideal leader combines strong people management with deep technical judgment and is comfortable operating close to architecture, system design, and implementation. This is an opportunity to build infrastructure that sits in the critical path of products and workflows across Rippling and becomes part of the technical fabric of the company.

What you will do

• Lead and develop a team of backend and platform engineers responsible for Rippling’s core Documents Platform.
• Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for making document capabilities a reusable platform primitive across Rippling.
• Build scalable APIs and backend services that allow internal product teams, AI and agentic workflows, and external developers to build document-based experiences.
• Drive the evolution of existing document infrastructure into a generalized platform that can serve use cases across Rippling rather than being tightly coupled to any one product area.
• Own complex technical decisions across distributed systems, data models, storage, APIs, reliability, and scalability.
• Stay deeply engaged in technical design and architecture while creating the environment for engineers to independently execute at a high level.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams across Rippling to understand their requirements and translate them into durable platform capabilities.
• Establish clear abstractions and platform interfaces that allow teams to move quickly without needing to understand or rebuild the underlying document infrastructure.
• Build for long‑term scale, extensibility, reliability, and developer experience as adoption of the platform grows.
• Hire, coach, and develop a high‑performing engineering team while setting a high bar for technical quality and execution.

What you will need

• Significant engineering leadership experience, including experience managing and developing high‑performing backend or platform engineering teams.
• A strong technical foundation in backend engineering, with the depth to actively participate in architecture and system design discussions.
• Experience building and operating large‑scale platforms, infrastructure, or foundational backend systems used by multiple products or engineering teams.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, databases, data layers, APIs, and scalable service architectures.
• Experience designing abstractions and reusable platform capabilities rather than building exclusively for a single product or use case.
• A track record of leading technically complex, cross‑functional initiatives with broad organizational impact.
• Strong judgment around scalability, reliability, system boundaries, API design, and long‑term architectural tradeoffs.
• The ability to move between technical strategy, hands‑on architectural leadership, people management, and execution.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when working with multiple engineering and product teams that depend on your platform.
• Experience with document infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow systems, or similarly complex platform domains is a plus.
• Experience building infrastructure that powers AI or agentic workflows is a plus.

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.