Senior Staff Software Engineer

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 $1.85B+ from the world's top investors - including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil and Goldman Sachs—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 Team

The Platform team is a foundational platform group responsible for raising the bar on technology, quality, performance, and reliability across Rippling's web and mobile applications. Our mission is to enable hundreds of product engineers across 30+ products to move fast without fragmenting the system or degrading critical paths. We do this by building and operating shared frameworks, full-stack platform services, and runtime infrastructure that become the default way UI is built at Rippling.

The team owns some of the highest-impact and highest-risk surfaces in the product — including App Shell, navigation, performance infrastructure, and configuration-driven platforms like SuperGrid and Flows. Small changes here can ripple across every application, which means we operate with a strong focus on modularity, isolation, governance, and enforcement, not just APIs and libraries. This is a team for engineers who enjoy working on foundations, care deeply about scale and correctness, and want their work to have org-wide leverage rather than local impact.

The opportunity

Rippling is building one of the largest and most complex SaaS products in the world, spanning HR, Finance, and IT. We're heavily investing in foundational platforms that power every product and every engineer across the company. As our surface area and engineering org scale rapidly, platform reliability, performance, and consistency are no longer optional - they must be built into the system by default.

We're hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer (L9) to technically lead Rippling's UI Platform as it evolves into a full-stack platform team responsible for end-to-end consistency, performance, and reliability across the product. This team owns not just UI frameworks across web and mobile, but foundational configuration-driven systems, and critical runtime paths - including SuperGrid, Config-driven Flows, App Shell, and performance infrastructure - that power every Rippling experience.

This is a strategic, bar-raising hire. You'll own some of the most critical paths in the product and its delivery while building new foundational platforms that eliminate fragmentation and encode best practices as defaults.

The role combines:

• Hands-on technical leadership
• Org-level architectural authority
• Informal people leadership and mentorship

You'll partner closely with staff and senior engineers, managers, and directors across the Platform organization to shape how Rippling builds and ships UI for years to come.

What you'll own

• Architect and own foundational Platform services used across Rippling, including App Shell, Performance frameworks, and configuration-driven systems like SuperGrid and Flows.
• Define and enforce architectural boundaries and contracts that isolate critical paths from product code to reduce blast radius.
• Establish performance budgets, tooling and automated enforcement to detect and prevent performance and reliability regressions before they reach production.
• Drive the evolution of configuration-driven platforms that replace bespoke implementations with scalable, reusable foundations.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across UI Platform (30+ engineers) and influence the broader Platform org .
• Act as the architectural authority for UI Platform initiatives - setting direction, reviewing designs, and making high-impact technical decisions.
• Partner with Product, Design, Infra, and Backend teams to translate ambiguous requirements into durable platform abstractions.

What success looks like

• Org-level leverage: Product teams ship faster without re-implementing common patterns or unintentionally breaking critical paths.
• Performance & reliability: App Shell consistently meets defined SLAs for performance and reliability, with regressions caught automatically.
• Consistency at scale: Core UI behaviors (grids, editor, navigation, flows) behave predictably across the product.
• Platform adoption: New and existing teams adopt UI Platform services as defaults rather than building bespoke solutions.
• Technical leadership: Engineers across the org look to you for architectural guidance and platform direction.

What we're looking for

• 15+ years of experience building large-scale end to end systems.
• Strong fundamentals in backend architecture: API design, dependency management, performance, reliability, and failure isolation.
• Proven experience leading internal platforms used by many teams.
• Track record of designing guardrails and enforcement mechanisms, not just guidelines.
• Ability to operate with organizational scope - influencing teams without direct reporting lines.
• Comfortable balancing hands-on execution with architectural leadership and mentorship.
• Excellent communication skills, especially in design docs, RFCs, and cross-team alignment.

Bonus points

• Experience owning or evolving foundational platform systems adopted by many teams.
• Background in large-scale migrations, including safely moving thousands of existing instances onto new platforms or frameworks.
• Practical use of AI-assisted developer tooling to speed up refactors, enforce invariants, or validate large system changes.
• Familiarity with performance budgets, reliability guardrails, and platform governance at scale.