Staff Software Engineer - Events Platform

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

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a senior backend engineer to own data ingestion capabilities and drive scalable platform work. You will lead cross-functional initiatives, architect distributed services, and collaborate with partners to shape product space.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years of backend experience, strong CS fundamentals, and a product-focused mindset. In-office presence is valued to foster collaboration and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Proven leadership on cross-functional projects.
• Experience with distributed services with high availability and SLA.
• Experience building large-scale APIs and developer tools.
• Strong CS fundamentals and design patterns.
• Product-focused with customer impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead mission-critical data ingestion projects end-to-end.
• Own products, APIs, or platform spaces.
• Build scalable distributed data ingestion systems and data lake architecture.
• Collaborate with partners and customers for feedback.
• Ensure operational excellence and scalability.
• Grow engineering skills across challenging areas.
• Influence architecture and technology decisions.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Data ingestion

Leadership

Product focus

CS fundamentals

Tools

Apache Spark

Flink

AWS

Observability tooling

Job description

About the role

The Events Platform team at Rippling builds the foundational infrastructure that powers a fully event-driven architecture across the company. As a core platform building block, the team enables systems to seamlessly emit, process, and react to events—unlocking critical capabilities like workflow automation, audit logging, and real-time product experiences.

Operating at significant scale, the platform processes over a billion events per day and continues to grow at ~10% month over month, making it one of the most critical and high-impact systems within Rippling. In addition to providing core platform primitives and supporting engineering teams across the company, the team has also shipped Audit Log, a product that powers the auditing solution across Rippling. The team focuses on building highly reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly primitives that accelerate product development and ensure consistency across the ecosystem.

What you will do

• Lead mission-critical projects and deliver data ingestions capabilities end-to-end with high quality
• Have clear ownership of one or many products, APIs or platform spaces
• Work within Rippling’s central infrastructure team, responsible for delivering highly scalable distributed data ingestion systems, build a data lake architecture for various downstream systems to consume
• Get exposure to partners and customers in different business domains, who will help provide feedback for your product space
• Ensure operational excellence and scale the platform capabilities to serve many Rippling Products
• Build and grow your engineering skills in different challenging areas and solve hard technical problems
• Influence architecture, technology selections, and trends of the whole company

What you will need

• 8+ years of professional work experience as a backend engineer
• Significant leadership experience driving complex cross-functional projects across teams, product managers, designers, etc
• Expertise in building complex distributed services with high availability and strict SLAs
• Experience building large-scale user-facing applications, APIs, and developer tools
• Strong CS fundamentals, and knowledge of architecture and common design patterns
• you're passionate about being in a product-focused environment where everyone cares deeply about customer impact
• You have experience of running data processing pipelines in production using distributed data processing frameworks like Apache Spark or Flink.
• Bonus points if you've built integrations with 3rd party SaaS providers and workflow orchestration systems
• Bonus points if you've previously worked with AWS and have working knowledge of observability tooling

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.