Engineering Manager, HRIS Flow Platform

About the role

Rippling is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our HRIS Flow Platform team - the foundational workflow orchestration platform powering how customers manage employee and organizational changes globally. This platform underpins 300+ critical workflows used across HR, Payroll, IT, and Finance products, and is central to Rippling's international expansion and enterprise growth strategy.

This is a highly strategic and deeply technical management role focused on rebuilding and scaling one of Rippling's most heavily utilized internal platforms. The existing system has reached scale limitations and now requires significant modernization to support increasingly complex workflows across countries, industries, employment types, and product surfaces including web, mobile, APIs, and AI-driven experiences.

You'll lead a high-performing team responsible for evolving the platform into a scalable, durable orchestration system capable of supporting the next generation of Rippling products. We are looking for a technical leader-manager ("TLM") who is excited to remain hands-on in architecture and coding while helping scale both the platform and the team over time.

This role is ideal for an engineering leader who enjoys operating close to the technology, solving hard distributed systems problems, and building platforms that enable other engineering teams to move faster.

What you will do

• Lead and mentor a high-performing engineering team: Manage and support a team of senior and staff engineers responsible for one of Rippling's most critical internal platforms.
• Drive the modernization of the HRIS Flow Platform: Lead technical strategy and execution for a foundational orchestration platform relied on across HR, Payroll, IT, and Finance products.
• Build scalable workflow infrastructure: Help evolve the platform to support web, mobile, AI, and API-driven workflows on a unified orchestration layer while improving reliability, consistency, and developer velocity.
• Improve platform performance and resiliency: Design systems that support both synchronous and asynchronous processing at scale with a focus on durability, operational correctness, and user experience.
• Stay hands-on technically: Participate meaningfully in architecture discussions, design reviews, debugging, and coding. This is a player-coach role where strong technical depth and day-to-day engineering involvement are expected.
• Partner closely with internal product teams: Collaborate with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and partner engineering teams to understand platform needs and deliver scalable developer-facing capabilities.
• Balance long-term architecture with fast execution: Make thoughtful technical tradeoffs while driving iterative delivery in a rapidly evolving environment.
• Help scale the organization over time: Support hiring and team growth as platform adoption and business complexity continue to expand.

What you will need

• 6+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend or distributed systems foundation.
• Prior engineering management, tech lead management, or team leadership experience in a high-growth engineering environment.
• Strong systems design experience building or scaling workflow orchestration systems, distributed processing systems, or internal platform infrastructure.
• Experience building developer platforms or infrastructure products used by other engineering teams at scale.
• Strong technical depth and hands-on credibility with the ability to engage deeply in architecture, implementation details, and engineering tradeoffs.
• Experience operating in environments where reliability, scalability, and performance are critical to the business.
• Strong product and execution mindset with the ability to balance platform investments against customer and business needs.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, prioritizing technical investments, and sequencing large-scale migrations or replatforming efforts.
• Strong communication and cross-functional partnership skills with the ability to work effectively across Engineering, Product, and Infrastructure teams.

Additional Information

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.

Pay and benefits

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.