Staff Software Engineer - AI Experiences

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

You will own omni-channel runtime, build DevX abstractions, and mentor engineers on frontier AI toolchains. This high-visibility position reports to engineering leadership in SF and targets enterprise-scale growth.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a backend-leaning fullstack foundation.
• Experience building scalable, reusable framework architectures for internal teams or customer-facing apps.
• Focus on product experience, abstractions, and durable code across multiple protocols.
• Proven ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus, and execute with velocity.
• You are a daily power user of AI toolchains (Claude, Cursor, Codex) and mentor peers.
• Exceptional communication skills for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own Omni-Channel Frameworks across Slack, Teams, Email, CLI, and native desktop shells.
• Engineer the Developer Experience (DevX) with robust APIs and abstractions for rapid AI capability integration.
• Transform interactive UX primitives from walls of text to high-performance UI components inside the response frame.
• Collaborate on Agent Lifecycle Observability with frontend primitives for backend engines and audit trails.
• Drive cross-functional pods, aligning SF platform engineering with global core infra teams.
• Champion AI-Native Engineering, setting best practices for AI-assisted software development.

Skills

Senior SWE

Platform architecture

Backend focus

Fullstack

Job description

Staff Software Engineer - AI Experiences

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

At Rippling, we are not just building standalone AI features; we are constructing an autonomous operating system for work.

You will be joining the AI Platform (AI Experiences) organization—the team behind Rippling AI, the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. While adjacent AI teams focus on training core machine learning models or building background automation agents, this specific group owns the interface engineering, omni-channel runtime, and developer frameworks that make Rippling AI functional, reusable, and visible everywhere work happens.

As a Staff Engineer for AI Experiences , you will sit at the crossroads of core platform infrastructure and end-user execution. You will design the underlying primitives that allow Rippling AI to break out of a single centralized chat window and expand into every ecosystem where employees communicate (Slack, Teams, Email, CLI, and Desktop apps). Additionally, you will build the Developer Experience (DevX) abstractions that enable over 24 downstream product teams (Payroll, Spend, Insurance, etc.) to seamlessly inject native, rich, and secure AI surfaces directly into their own codebases.

This is a deeply hands-on, high-visibility role reporting directly to our engineering leadership in San Francisco, with immediate impact on our upmarket enterprise scaling strategy.

What you will do

• Own Omni-Channel Frameworks: Architect the shared, channel-specific logic and infrastructure required to run Rippling AI seamlessly across multiple mediums—including Slack, Teams, Email, CLI, and native desktop shells—without reinventing the architectural wheel for every new channel.
• Engineer the Developer Experience (DevX): Design robust APIs, abstractions, and contract interfaces that empower Rippling’s broader product engineering organization to rapidly build specialized AI capabilities and embed native AI elements straight into their application views.
• Transform Interactive UX Primitives: Lead the evolution of the chat runtime from standard "walls of text" into high-performance, dynamic UI components (e.g., streaming interactive maps, interactive tables, and visual workflows directly inside the response frame).
• Partner on Agent Lifecycle Observability: Collaborate closely with adjacent Automation and Agent teams to establish frontend primitives for background execution engines, designing how system states, admin settings, and conversation histories are securely rendered and audited.
• Drive Cross-Functional Pods: Spearhead distributed technical initiatives connecting platform engineering in San Francisco with specialized core infrastructure teams globally, ensuring tight alignment on system runtime dependencies.
• Champion AI-Native Engineering: Establish best practices for AI-assisted software development, mentoring senior and mid-level engineers on how to safely and effectively leverage LLM tools (Cursor, Claude, Codex) to maximize velocity and code craft.

What you will need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend-leaning fullstack foundation and a proven history of shipping high-scale, platform-level capabilities.
• Experience building scalable, reusable framework architectures for other internal engineering teams, or you have personally guided zero-to-one customer-facing applications through high-growth scale cycles.
• You focus heavily on product experience, technical abstractions, and code durability; you know how to build a unified solution that handles complex state and metadata across multiple communication protocols without falling into over-engineering traps.
• Proven ability to navigate extreme ambiguity, drive technical consensus across complex multi-product matrices, and execute with blitz-scale velocity.
• You don't just use AI because a project dictates it; you are a passionate, daily power user of the frontier toolchain (Claude, Cursor, Codex, or personal agentic workflows) and actively upskill your peers on these technologies.
• Exceptional communication skills, ability to communicate technical details to non technical stakeholders

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.