Senior Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

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

Rippling’s Infrastructure organization is responsible for the systems that allow 1,000+ engineers to build and ship products at high velocity across dozens of products. As AI agents increasingly automate, scale and improve large parts of development workflows, the way we build software is fundamentally changing. Rippling Engineers are extremely excited about these innovations and the promise they hold to let us innovate even better and faster for our customers.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the evolution of our Developer Experience stack (DevX) for the agentic era. This role sits at the intersection of DevX, CI/CD, platform architecture and distributed systems design. You will drive the technical direction for how engineers (using AI agents as their primary interface) interact with the large codebases underlying our Business Operating System.

This is a high-impact IC leadership role. You will make critical architectural decisions that affect engineering velocity across 100+ teams, balancing local team autonomy with the needs of a tightly integrated system. Your decisions will directly impact the day-to-day of all our Engineers and play a direct role in our productivity as a whole.

We operate with high ambition in a fast-paced environment with strong ownership and significant autonomy. If you are excited about removing friction at scale and shaping how software gets built inside a large, complex system, this role is for you.

What you will do

• Own and evolve the end-to-end Developer Experience stack, including local and cloud environments, agent sandboxes, CI/CD, test harnesses, repository management, and agentic coding workflows
• Gain a strong understanding of the day-to-day of our developers and an opinion of what flows, tools and UX they need to be maximally happy and effective
• Identify and eliminate systemic friction that slows engineers and AI agents
• Define architectural standards that balance team independence with system-wide consistency
• Drive large-scale technical migrations and DevX transformations across 100+ teams
• Build systems that scale across a 1,000+ engineer organization
• Make high-leverage “fork in the road” decisions that shape long-term development velocity
• Work cross-functionally with Infra, Platform, and Product engineering leaders to execute in high-ambiguity environments
• Jump into complex codebases (Python/Go) and diagnose deep systemic issues when necessary

What you will need

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience operating at Staff/Senior Staff level
• A passion for understanding, and fulfilling, internal customers needs and impeccable product taste
• Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems in high-growth SaaS environments
• Strong backend engineering depth; fluency in both statically typed (e.g., Go/Java) and dynamically typed (e.g., Python/Ruby) languages
• Experience influencing architecture and technical strategy across large organizations
• A track record of driving complex technical initiatives that span many teams
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity, high-autonomy environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to align senior stakeholders

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 accommodations@rippling.com

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.