Senior Global Payroll Architect & Engineer

Rippling, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 331,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling in San Francisco is seeking a senior backend leader for its Payroll Run Management team to architect and deliver scalable payroll systems across 70+ countries.

You will own end-to-end delivery, drive the technical roadmap, and mentor engineers while collaborating with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to ship cohesive platform solutions.

This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits, with compensation aligned to SF Bay Area standards.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a proven track record of technical leadership and driving org-wide impact.
• Expertise in building large-scale, distributed backend systems.
• Experience managing the complete project lifecycle, transforming intricate ideas and ambiguous requirements into successful launches independently.
• Deep expertise in system architecture, data modeling, and building core services with clean abstractions.
• A keen product sense and a passion for advocating for the customer, with experience building robust systems that directly impact business-critical flows.
• Outstanding capacity to convey intricate technical concepts clearly and precisely, both in writing and verbally, to diverse functional teams.
• Experience with MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our global payroll calculation engine, designing scalable frameworks that support operations across multiple countries.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features, from initial design and technical specifications through to production deployment and monitoring.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the Calculations team, identifying and tackling performance bottlenecks, reliability improvements, and architectural refactors.
• Take on ambiguous technical challenges and turn them into concrete, actionable plans for the team.
• Exercise expert technical judgment in building scalable, maintainable, and extensible systems, ensuring data integrity across complex and interdependent services.
• Raise the engineering bar for the entire organization by mentoring senior and junior engineers, leading in-depth design reviews, and championing best practices for code quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate across functions with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to deliver cohesive, platform-wide solutions.

Skills

Python

Django

Distributed backend

Tech leadership

Data modeling

Communication

Product sense

Tools

MongoDB

Job description

Rippling in San Francisco is seeking a senior backend leader for its Payroll Run Management team to architect and deliver scalable payroll systems across 70+ countries.

You will own end-to-end delivery, drive the technical roadmap, and mentor engineers while collaborating with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to ship cohesive platform solutions.

This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits, with compensation aligned to SF Bay Area standards.