Staff Software Engineer, Scalable Search & Platform

Rippling; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a senior backend/platform engineer to own architecture for Search. You will design cross-platform primitives powering the next generation of Rippling features and partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap.

Lead the indexing, retrieval, relevance, and query performance at scale while collaborating with Data Cloud, platform, and AI teams to build shared search primitives across Rippling’s products.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend/platform engineering with ownership of distributed systems.
• Deep experience in search infrastructure and relevance tuning.
• Strong systems design fundamentals for storage, indexing, and query execution.
• Experience with data platforms and large-scale ingestion/serving paths.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Java.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the technical vision for Rippling search systems, including indexing pipelines and ranking.
• Tackle open-ended challenges in hybrid retrieval and semantic/vector search.
• Build and operate high-performance infrastructure capable of scaling with low latency.
• Define relevance strategy, offline benchmarks, and production monitoring.
• Build reusable search platform abstractions used by multiple Rippling products.
• Elevate engineering through design reviews, mentorship, and best-in-class standards.

Skills

Distributed systems

Search infrastructure

Backend languages (Python/Go/Java)

Systems design

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Lucene/Solr

Job description

Rippling is seeking a senior backend/platform engineer to own architecture for Search. You will design cross-platform primitives powering the next generation of Rippling features and partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap.

Lead the indexing, retrieval, relevance, and query performance at scale while collaborating with Data Cloud, platform, and AI teams to build shared search primitives across Rippling’s products.