Staff Software Engineer - Variable Compensation

About Rippling Rippling is the first way for businesses to manage all of their HR & IT—payroll, benefits, computers, apps, and more—in one unified workforce platform. By connecting every business system to one source of truth for employee data, businesses can automate all of the manual work they normally need to do to make employee changes. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can just click a button and set up a new employees’ payroll, health insurance, work computer, and third-party apps—like Slack, Zoom, and Office 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.8B from the world's top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Bedrock, and Greenoaks—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes (#12 out of 500) About the Team The Variable Compensation (VC) team at Rippling is on a mission to revolutionize how organizations design, manage, and distribute performance-based pay. As an agile team we operate at the dynamic intersection of Finance,HR and Artificial Intelligence. We are spearheading an AI-first product, navigating highly ambiguous, evolving requirements to build a seamless, intuitive, and highly scalable compensation platform from the ground up. The team is structured into four key focus areas: • Compensation Engine – Build the foundational system that powers dynamic pay rules and performance metrics, designed with the flexibility to support a wide range of custom compensation structures. • Payment Orchestration – Design world class payment orchestrators and ledgers that support a wide range of use cases . • AI-First Design & Explainability – Leverage artificial intelligence to assist customers with plan design, setup, and administration, while building a robust "Explainability Layer" that gives employees a clear, 360-degree view of how their payouts are calculated. Few Technical Challenges We Solve • Scale : Build systems that can scale and process millions of payouts across thousands of unique and complex compensation plans. • Infinite Flexibility: Build a rules engine capable of supporting the vast, complex, and highly customized ways different companies pay their people • Resilience and Accuracy : Build financial systems that are 100% correct. Design systems that can adapt to increasing complexity without compromising performance or accuracy. • Pioneering AI Integration: Design and build natively AI-driven architecture from scratch. We are translating highly ambiguous, unstructured compensation philosophies into deterministic, executable code using intelligent automation. About the Role This role at Variable Compensation Team is a great opportunity to be a key technical leader at Rippling with high visibility and growth opportunities. The successful candidate will be responsible for leading the development and delivery of Rippling's finance platform. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to architect scalable systems, enhance existing features, and drive innovation in our product offerings, ensuring the successful delivery of high-quality, scalable, and reliable financial services to our customers. What you’ll do • Architect and Lead: Design, develop, and maintain internet-scale, highly distributed systems and scalable services for the Rippling HRIS team. • Hands-On Coding: Actively participate in coding and code reviews, using languages such as Python, Golang, and Java. • Technical Leadership: Provide visionary technical leadership, setting the direction for engineering best practices and the adoption of advanced technologies. • Mentorship: Mentor and support engineers across the organization, fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and technical excellence. • System Design: Architect systems capable of handling millions of users simultaneously, ensuring high performance, reliability, and scalability. • API Development: Design and implement clean, modularized abstraction APIs and programmatic APIs for both end users and engineers, including Backend for Frontend (BFF) systems. • Storage Solutions: Design and implement Analytical systems that encompass both analytical (e.g., Presto, S3, Snowflake) and transactional (e.g., MySQL, Aurora, MongoDB) systems. They should be able to handle petabyte scale • Resiliency and SLAs: Develop and maintain systems with high availability and reliability, targeting four or five 9s (99.99% or 99.999%) uptime. • Observability: Implement comprehensive observability practices, including monitoring, logging, and tracing, to ensure system health and performance. • Streaming and Workflow Systems: Build and integrate streaming solutions (e.g., Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Kafka Connect) and workflow systems for both transactional and analytical workflows. • Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, data science, and operations, to align on strategic goals and ensure successful project delivery. • Innovation: Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies, driving innovation and continuous improvement within the Rippling HRIS team. • Documentation and Standards: Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation and standards for system architecture, design, and operational processes. Qualifications • Experience: 9+ years of experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on building large-scale distributed systems and scalable services. • Technical Expertise: Proficient in coding with languages such as Python, Golang, and Java. Deep understanding of distributed computing principles, data architecture, and scalable system design. • Leadership: Demonstrated experience in technical leadership roles, with a proven track record of mentoring and developing engineering teams. • Systems Expertise: Extensive experience in building systems handling millions of users in parallel and developing scalable services. Deep understanding of SLAs, system resiliency, and o