Staff Software Engineer - Run Managment

About the role

The Payroll Run Management team is at the heart of Rippling's global payroll engine, building the foundational systems that ensure employees in over 70+ countries are paid accurately, on time, and with minimal friction. We serve as the central orchestrator within the payroll ecosystem, owning all the critical user-facing interfaces while abstracting away the underlying complexity of payroll systems.

Our mission is to make payroll a delight, not a chore. Payroll is inherently complex - filled with jurisdictional rules, tax regulations, benefits integration, and edge cases across global geographies. But our team works hard to abstract away these complexities, allowing customers to confidently run payroll without needing to become payroll experts in every country where they operate.

As a team, we focus on delivering delightful user experiences, resilient backend systems, and extensible architecture to support a rapidly evolving global product. We tackle hard technical challenges that have massive business impact - powering one of Rippling's most mission-critical products. If you're passionate about building well-designed, scalable systems that abstract away complexity for end users, this is the team to be on.

Describe the role and team the candidate will be joining

What you will do

• Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our global payroll calculation engine, designing scalable frameworks that support operations across multiple countries.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features, from initial design and technical specifications through to production deployment and monitoring.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the Calculations team, identifying and tackling performance bottlenecks, reliability improvements, and architectural refactors.
• Take on ambiguous technical challenges (e.g., "design a system to support any country's tax model") and turn them into concrete, actionable plans for the team.
• Exercise expert technical judgment in building scalable, maintainable, and extensible systems, ensuring data integrity across complex and interdependent services.
• Raise the engineering bar for the entire organization by mentoring senior and junior engineers, leading in-depth design reviews, and championing best practices for code quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate across functions with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to deliver cohesive, platform-wide solutions.

What you will need

• 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a proven track record of technical leadership and driving org-wide impact.
• Expertise in building large-scale, distributed backend systems. Strong proficiency in Python and Django is highly preferred.
• Experience managing the complete project lifecycle, transforming intricate ideas and ambiguous requirements into successful launches independently.
• Deep expertise in system architecture, data modeling, and building core services with clean abstractions.
• A keen product sense and a passion for advocating for the customer, with experience building robust systems that directly impact business-critical flows.
• Outstanding capacity to convey intricate technical concepts clearly and precisely, both in writing and verbally, to diverse functional teams.
• Experience with MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases is a strong plus.

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.