Staff Software Engineer, Global Payroll Platform — Equity

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead payroll processing, shaping the core platform that handles billions in payments monthly. You will own architecture, scalability, and long-term technical vision, collaborating with product, payments, risk, and accounting teams to deliver robust, scalable payroll solutions.

The role emphasizes mentoring engineers, driving design reviews, improving observability, and raising the engineering bar across the organization.

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. Strong proficiency in Python and Django is highly preferred.
• 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.
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of projects, while also thriving in a team environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our global payroll processing engine.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features from design to production deployment.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the Payroll processing team and address performance bottlenecks and reliability improvements.
• Tackle ambiguous technical challenges and turn them into actionable plans for the team.
• Exercise expert technical judgment to build scalable, maintainable systems with data integrity.
• Raise the engineering bar by mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, and promoting best practices.
• Collaborate with Product, Payments, Risk, Accounting and other engineering leaders on platform-wide solutions.

Skills

8+ years experience

Distributed backend

Python

Django

Leadership

Architecture

Product sense

Communication

Tools

MongoDB

Job description

Rippling in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead payroll processing, shaping the core platform that handles billions in payments monthly. You will own architecture, scalability, and long-term technical vision, collaborating with product, payments, risk, and accounting teams to deliver robust, scalable payroll solutions.

The role emphasizes mentoring engineers, driving design reviews, improving observability, and raising the engineering bar across the organization.