Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure

About the role

Rippling's Infrastructure organization builds the technical backbone that powers our entire product ecosystem. As we prepare to quadruple our global footprint, the Cloud team is tasked with evolving our foundation to handle a significant surge in daily events and system complexity.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Cloud Infrastructure team, you'll be in a high-leverage role tackling complex scaling challenges - from managing massive Kubernetes fleets across all accounts to architecting multi-region disaster recovery and agentic AI workflows. You will not just maintain systems; you will build the automated, self-service primitives that allow Rippling to scale to the next order of magnitude. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, distributed systems and ability to drive technical consensus across the entire engineering organization.

What you will do

• Design and implement the next generation of our cloud infrastructure to support a 4x increase in system load, ensuring resilience and performance at scale.
• Own the evolution of our K8s ecosystem, ensuring our core monolith and growing microservices environment remain performant and developer-friendly.
• Leverage your product development background to build infrastructure primitives that make it easier for product teams to ship complex features seamlessly.
• Tackle high-order problems related to global consistency, database contention, and high-throughput background processing..
• Work deeply with infrastructure to manage complex distributed systems that power every Rippling product.
• Drive technical consensus on complex, cross-functional initiatives, acting as a bridge between infrastructure and product engineering
• Engineer high-efficiency resource strategies, optimizing Kubernetes utilization and AWS spend to ensure our infrastructure scales sustainably with our business growth.
• Act as a force multiplier for the Cloud team, setting the standard for code quality and architectural patterns that will define the next decade of Rippling.

What you will need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting and scaling infrastructure.
• Background in product development with an understanding that infrastructure exists to empower developers and serve the end-user.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and a strong grasp of where standard architectural patterns break under extreme load.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering teams
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes orchestration, including custom controllers, networking, and sophisticated scaling strategies.
• Ability to approach a massive, complex codebase as a fascinating engineering puzzle that requires world-class architectural thinking.
• High proficiency in modern backend languages (Python, Go, or Java), with a desire to master Python and the ability to dive deep into any stack to solve a bottleneck.

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.