Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Data Platform

Rippling; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Data team to design and build high-scale data infrastructure and query systems powering payroll, tax, and accounting integrations worldwide. You will work at the intersection of product engineering and data infrastructure, defining ingestion, materialization, aggregation, and query strategies across real-time and batch systems.

You will lead foundational pipelines and platform capabilities used by Tax, Accounting, Reporting, AI, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong data infrastructure background, including pipelines or large-scale data platforms.
• Expertise in distributed systems with batch vs real-time tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in a modern backend language (Go/Java/Python).
• Experience with transactional and analytical data stores and optimizing schemas.
• Platform mindset with reusable abstractions.
• Operational rigor: observability, reliability, and production debugging.
• Strong communication and ability to influence design decisions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build core data systems powering payroll reports, tax & accounting integrations.
• Define a unified data query layer across batch and real-time processing.
• Own end-to-end data pipelines including ETL/ELT and backfills.
• Drive non-functional excellence with monitoring, logging, alerts, and data quality checks.
• Solve interoperability challenges between Payroll Data and other systems.
• Provide technical leadership, review designs, and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Platform, AI, and Payroll teams.

Skills

Backend development

Data infrastructure

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python

Transactional QA/data stores

Platform mindset

Observability & reliability

Communication

Ownership & autonomy

Job description

Rippling is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Data team to design and build high-scale data infrastructure and query systems powering payroll, tax, and accounting integrations worldwide. You will work at the intersection of product engineering and data infrastructure, defining ingestion, materialization, aggregation, and query strategies across real-time and batch systems.

You will lead foundational pipelines and platform capabilities used by Tax, Accounting, Reporting, AI, and