Senior Engineering Manager, Tools and Observability

Rippling, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 207,000 - 345,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling, Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Tools and Observability to lead internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure at scale in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You will drive long‑term technical strategy, mentor engineers, and partner with cross‑functional teams to improve productivity, reliability, and incident response for production systems. The role requires 8+ years in software or infrastructure engineering and 4+ years in management, with a strong background

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience.
• Experience leading teams that build internal developer tools, platforms, or observability infra.
• Strong depth in distributed systems and cloud production environments.
• Experience with logging, metrics, tracing, or error-monitoring at scale.
• Developer experience mindset and ability to translate needs into tools.
• Strong operational judgment on troubleshooting, alerting and incident response.
• Experience developing senior engineers through mentorship.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team responsible for internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure.
• Define the long‑term technical strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability.
• Build and evolve internal tools and self‑service capabilities for developers.
• Own reliability, scalability, and usability of logging, metrics, tracing, and error monitoring systems.
• Partner with engineering teams to understand needs and drive adoption of shared tools.
• Establish best practices for instrumentation, alerting, and production debugging.
• Lead cross‑team initiatives to improve developer workflows and reduce operational overhead.
• Develop and mentor engineers while maintaining ownership and technical excellence.
• Drive observability coverage, platform performance, and cost efficiency.

Skills

Software engineering

Engineering management

Internal dev tools

Observability tooling

Distributed systems

Cloud environments

Developer experience

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

Observability tooling

Internal tooling

Job description

Senior Engineering Manager, Tools and Observability

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 Infrastructure organization owns the foundational systems that power every product and service across the company. Supporting more than 1,000 engineers and millions of end users, the Tools and Observability team builds the internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure that help engineers develop, operate, and troubleshoot services at scale.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead the team responsible for improving developer productivity and providing visibility into the health of Rippling’s production systems. This includes internal tooling, platform self‑service capabilities, and the logging, metrics, tracing, and error‑monitoring infrastructure engineers rely on to understand system behavior and debug production issues.

You will partner closely with engineering teams across the organization to identify friction in their workflows, build reliable and intuitive tools, and make it easier to deliver and operate high‑quality software as Rippling continues to scale.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a team responsible for Rippling’s internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure
• Define the long‑term technical strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability
• Build and evolve internal tools and self‑service capabilities that simplify how engineers develop, troubleshoot, and operate services
• Own the reliability, scalability, and usability of logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and error‑monitoring systems
• Partner with engineering teams to understand their needs, prioritize improvements, and drive adoption of shared tools and platforms
• Establish best practices for instrumentation, actionable alerting, and production debugging
• Lead initiatives across engineering organizations that improve developer workflows and reduce operational overhead
• Develop and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong culture of ownership and technical excellence
• Drive improvements in observability coverage, platform performance, and cost efficiency

What you will need

• 8+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience
• 4+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience leading teams that build internal developer tools, shared engineering platforms, or observability infrastructure
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems and cloud‑based production environments
• Experience building or operating logging, metrics, tracing, or error‑monitoring systems at scale
• A strong developer experience mindset, with the ability to translate engineering needs into intuitive, widely adopted tools
• Strong operational judgment, including experience improving production troubleshooting, alerting, and incident response
• Experience developing senior engineers, Staff Engineers, and Principal Engineers
• Excellent cross‑functional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to drive initiatives across engineering teams

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.

The pay range for this role is:

207,000 - 345,000 USD per year (US San Francisco Bay Area)