Staff Software Engineer - Platform

About Rippling

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.

Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 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, Greenoaks, and Bedrock and was named one of Americas best startup employers by Forbes.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About Team: -

The Task Inbox is already among the top 10 most-used surfaces in Rippling. We are looking for a Staff Engineer to lead the Tasks & Approvals team and drive the evolution of this surface into an enterprise-grade task orchestration platform — the go-to place where every Rippling user navigates to do their work.

About The Role

You will own the technical vision and execution for a platform that touches every product at Rippling. Every time a user needs to approve a request, sign a document, complete an onboarding form, or act on any task across the product suite, they interact with systems you build. Your work will directly impact millions of end users and dozens of internal product teams.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set architectural direction, drive the hardest design decisions, write code in the critical path, and mentor a team of engineers — while partnering closely with Product and Design to ship an experience that users love.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architectural vision for the Tasks & Approvals platform, evolving the existing Task Inbox and Approvals systems into a unified, enterprise-grade orchestration layer. Define the connector framework, task class definitions, lifecycle APIs, and domain event contracts that product teams build on top of.
• Design and build multi-stage task orchestration — from simple acknowledge-and-complete tasks to complex, multi-step approval chains with configurable policies, escalation paths, reassignment, delegation, and SLA enforcement. Consolidate orchestration logic that is currently scattered across product codebases into a shared platform layer.
• Create a best-in-class developer experience for internal product teams and third-party integrations. Design the standard contracts, SDKs (Go, Python, JS), and RPK kits that allow any team to register new task types, define views and actions, and configure notification/reminder/archival policies — all without touching platform code.
• Drive the frontend architecture for a composable, embeddable inbox component with infinite scroll, multi-dimensional filtering, dynamic grouping, deep-linking, and persistent layout preferences — serving personas from high-volume super admins to lightweight employee experiences.
• Partner with product teams across Rippling to ensure the platform surfaces highly contextual, domain-specific information directly in the inbox — so users can make approval decisions on salary changes, time-off requests, spend reimbursements, and more without navigating away.
• Set the technical bar for the team through code reviews, design reviews, and mentorship. Build a culture of pragmatic engineering excellence, clear documentation, and iterative delivery.
• Own reliability and performance for one of the most-used surfaces in the product — including monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and incident response.
  
  

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of designing and shipping platform systems that other teams build on top of.
• Deep experience with workflow or task orchestration systems — state machines, multi-stage pipelines, approval chains, event-driven architectures, or similar. You have built systems where external teams plug in via contracts/APIs and the platform handles execution.
• Strong platform and API design skills. You think in terms of contracts, connectors, canonical models, and developer experience. You know how to design APIs and SDKs that dozens of teams adopt with minimal onboarding friction.
• Full-stack capability. You are comfortable working across backend (Go or Python) and frontend (React/TypeScript). You dont need to be an expert in both, but you can make informed architectural decisions across the stack.
• Experience with high-scale, multi-tenant systems. You understand company isolation, data partitioning, tiered storage, and the operational concerns that come with a platform serving millions of users.
• Technical leadership at the Staff level. You have driven cross-team architectural decisions, written design documents that shaped multi-quarter roadmaps, and mentored engineers across levels. You influence through clarity of thought, not authority.
• Bias for shipping. You balance long-term architectural vision with pragmatic, incremental delivery. You know how to migrate live systems without big-bang rewrites.