Staff Platform & Data Engineer

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Data team in San Francisco. You will help design and build high‑scale data infrastructure and query systems powering payroll data globally.

You will lead architectural decisions across ETL/streaming pipelines, unified data access, and platform capabilities, while mentoring engineers and driving reliability and observability in production.

Qualifications

• :8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact on backend or data-intensive systems.
• :Strong data infrastructure background with data pipelines, ETL/ELT, or large-scale data platforms.
• :Expertise in distributed systems with batch vs. real-time processing tradeoffs.
• :Proficiency in Go, Java, Python and comfort across multiple systems.
• :Experience with transactional and analytical data stores; optimize schemas and queries.
• :Platform mindset; reusable abstractions for multiple teams.
• :Hands-on observability, reliability, and debugging in production.
• :Strong communication; influence design decisions across teams.
• :Ownership and autonomy balanced with collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable data infrastructure and pipelines powering payroll reports, pay stubs, tax and accounting integrations, billing, and AI use cases.
• Define a unified data query layer spanning batch and real-time processing to enable consistent access patterns.
• Own end-to-end data pipelines, with data correctness, schema evolution, backfills, and lifecycle management.
• Drive non-functional excellence by building observable, scalable, and reliable systems with monitoring and data quality checks.
• Solve deep interoperability problems at the boundaries between Payroll Data and other core systems.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, reviewing designs and guiding engineers to raise the team's bar.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Platform, AI, and Payroll teams to translate product needs into robust platform capabilities.

Skills

8+ years

Data infrastructure

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python

Transactional/analytical stores

Platform mindset

Observability & reliability

Communication

Ownership & autonomy

Job description

Rippling is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Data team in San Francisco. You will help design and build high‑scale data infrastructure and query systems powering payroll data globally.

You will lead architectural decisions across ETL/streaming pipelines, unified data access, and platform capabilities, while mentoring engineers and driving reliability and observability in production.