Staff Software Engineer - Run Managment

rippling; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Payroll Run Management team, responsible for the global payroll engine that pays 70+ countries with accuracy and efficiency. You will lead architectural decisions, own complex feature delivery, and drive performance and scalability improvements across distributed backend systems.

The role emphasizes building maintainable, extensible systems, mentoring engineers, and collaborating with product and HRIS teams to deliver cohesive

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with leadership impact.
• Expertise in building large-scale distributed backend systems; Python/Django preferred.
• Experience delivering end-to-end features from design to production deployment.
• Deep knowledge of system architecture and data modeling for core services.
• Strong product sense and customer focus in building robust systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication across diverse teams.
• Experience with NoSQL databases is a plus (MongoDB).

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design for global payroll calculation engines.
• Own end-to-end delivery of high-impact features from design to deployment.
• Drive technical roadmap, performance, reliability, and refactor efforts.
• Tackle ambiguous requirements and convert them into actionable plans.
• Mentor engineers and promote code quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate with Product, HRIS, and engineering leaders to deliver platform-wide solutions.

Skills

Python

Django

Distributed systems

System architecture

Leadership

Product sense

Communication

MongoDB

Tools

MongoDB

Job description

About Rippling

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

The Payroll Run Management team is at the heart of Rippling’s global payroll engine, building the foundational systems that ensure employees in over 70+ countries are paid accurately, on time, and with minimal friction. We serve as the central orchestrator within the payroll ecosystem, owning all the critical user-facing interfaces while abstracting away the underlying complexity of payroll systems.

Our mission is to make payroll a delight, not a chore. Payroll is inherently complex - filled with jurisdictional rules, tax regulations, benefits integration, and edge cases across global geographies. But our team works hard to abstract away these complexities, allowing customers to confidently run payroll without needing to become payroll experts in every country where they operate.

As a team, we focus on delivering delightful user experiences, resilient backend systems, and extensible architecture to support a rapidly evolving global product. We tackle hard technical challenges that have massive business impact - powering one of Rippling’s most mission-critical products. If you’re passionate about building well-designed, scalable systems that abstract away complexity for end users, this is the team to be on.

What you will do

• Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our global payroll calculation engine, designing scalable frameworks that support operations across multiple countries.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features, from initial design and technical specifications through to production deployment and monitoring.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the Calculations team, identifying and tackling performance bottlenecks, reliability improvements, and architectural refactors.
• Take on ambiguous technical challenges (e.g., "design a system to support any country's tax model") and turn them into concrete, actionable plans for the team.
• Exercise expert technical judgment in building scalable, maintainable, and extensible systems, ensuring data integrity across complex and interdependent services.
• Raise the engineering bar for the entire organization by mentoring senior and junior engineers, leading in-depth design reviews, and championing best practices for code quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate across functions with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to deliver cohesive, platform-wide solutions.

What you will need

• 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.

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.