Principal Software Engineer

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.

• →Define and drive long-term architecture for Global Payroll systems that support multi-country payroll, country-specific rules, local currency workflows, payroll approvals, reporting, and integrations.
• →Lead complex, cross-functional technical initiatives that span payroll, HRIS, time, benefits, finance, compliance, and accounting systems.
• →Design durable platform abstractions that let Rippling launch and scale payroll capabilities across jurisdictions without creating brittle one-off implementations.
• →Improve the reliability, observability, auditability, and operational resilience of payroll systems that customers depend on for accurate and timely pay.
• →Make pragmatic technical tradeoffs in systems where correctness, compliance, latency, maintainability, and speed of product development all matter.
• →Identify and systematically reduce architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, and operational risk across the Global Payroll platform.
• →Partner with product and business leaders to translate customer needs, regulatory complexity, and business strategy into technical direction.
• →Mentor and uplevel engineers across teams through design reviews, code reviews, technical coaching, and clear engineering standards.
• →Stay hands-on with implementation in critical areas, especially where the work is ambiguous, technically risky, or foundational to future scale.
• →Represent strong engineering judgment in planning, prioritization, incident review, and long-term roadmap discussions.

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering.
• Proven experience operating at Senior Staff / Principal / Staff+ technical scope.
• Deep hands-on engineering foundation with strong coding, debugging, design, and system-building experience.
• Strong programming ability in one or more backend/general-purpose languages such as Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Strong architecture and system design depth across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance.
• Ability to own ambiguous, cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to make trade-offs across speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
• Strong mentorship mindset with a track record of raising the technical bar for other engineers.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies.
• Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow engines, data platforms, or internal tooling.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, LLM systems, automation platforms, evaluation frameworks, or data-intensive systems.
• Experience with reliability engineering, incident management, observability, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
• Experience with security, compliance, permissions, auditability, or enterprise-grade systems.
• Prior experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains.
• Ability to operate as a “builder-leader” — someone who can define direction, align stakeholders, and still stay close to execution.