Staff Software Engineer - Rippling AI

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.

Rippling is building core AI Platform infrastructure that will power intelligent and automated experiences across the company. This includes background agents, automated workflows, evaluation systems, data pipelines, model-quality loops, sandboxing, scaling, latency, reliability, and platform primitives that other product teams can build on.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will operate as a hands-on technical leader. You will own ambiguous platform problems, lead cross-functional initiatives, shape architecture, and continue to write/review/debug production code. This role is not for someone who wants to only advise or delegate.

• →Own major AI Platform initiatives across backend, platform, infrastructure, and AI-enabled systems.
• →Lead design and execution for systems supporting agents, evals, automation, data pipelines, model quality, sandboxing, scaling, latency, and reliability.
• →Act as a technical lead for cross-functional work involving Product, Infra, Platform, AI, and Engineering teams.
• →Break down ambiguous technical problems into clear architecture and execution plans.
• →Write code, review critical code paths, debug production issues, and make implementation-level decisions.
• →Build platform systems that can be reused by multiple product teams across Rippling.
• →Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and technical guidance.
• →Balance speed, quality, reliability, and long-term platform maintainability.

• 10–15 years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platform, or product engineering.
• Strong hands-on coding ability; must be willing to remain close to code, debugging, design reviews, and implementation details.
• Strong programming knowledge in one or more languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Proven experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience in high-growth or hyper-growth startup/product environments is strongly preferred.
• Strong system design and architecture fundamentals across APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and production operations.
• Ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives without formal authority.
• Strong product intuition and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business impact.
• Ability to mentor engineers and raise the technical bar while continuing to code.
• Practical exposure or strong curiosity around AI agents, LLM infrastructure, agentic workflows, ML/data infrastructure, inference pipelines, evals, fine-tuning, post-training, or automation systems.

• Recent hands-on experience building AI agents, LLM tooling, AI infrastructure, automation platforms, eval systems, or model-quality systems.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, background automation, self-healing systems, reliability platforms, or internal developer platforms.
• Experience with permissions, approvals, auditability, compliance, security-sensitive workflows, or enterprise-grade controls.
• Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
• Experience with Go, Java, C++, or Scala in platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or large-scale backend environments.
• Experience in AI-native, cloud/infra, platform-heavy, enterprise SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, or workflow-heavy companies.