Senior Software Engineer

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It consolidates workforce systems such as payroll, expenses, benefits, computers, and third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365 into a single platform for managing the entire employee lifecycle.

About the AI Platform Team

The AI Platform team represents one of Rippling's highest-priority engineering investments. The team builds foundational infrastructure powering AI capabilities across HR, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, IT, Finance, Compliance, and Workforce Management. Instead of standalone chatbots, they create deeply integrated AI systems that understand business context, permissions, workflows, and enterprise data.

The team develops core platform capabilities including AI agents, workflow automation engines, evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, data pipelines, and self-healing systems. These operate with real business context and auditability requirements to safely delegate operational tasks while maintaining control.

Key focus areas include agent orchestration, workflow execution, reliability, permissions management, evaluations, observability, data quality, and scalable AI infrastructure built directly on Rippling's unified data model.

About the Role

You will own production components end-to-end for backend/platform systems supporting AI agents, automated workflows, evals, data pipelines, sandboxing, reliability, and model-quality infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on role with 60% coding expectation.

What You Will Do

• Build scalable backend and platform systems for the AI Platform.
• Own components from design through launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Work on foundational AI systems including background agents, automated workflows, eval frameworks, data pipelines, reliability systems, and feedback loops.
• Partner with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering to translate ambiguous problems into production-ready solutions.
• Write production-quality code, review code, debug issues, and improve system reliability.
• Contribute to system design and architecture discussions.
• Enhance observability, operational maturity, scalability, and performance.
• Mentor junior engineers through reviews and technical guidance.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of software engineering experience in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or product engineering.
• Strong hands-on coding ability with a 60% coding expectation.
• Proficiency in Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience operating scalable backend/platform systems in production.
• Solid fundamentals in system design: APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, observability, debugging, and operations.
• Ability to independently own well-defined to moderately ambiguous technical problems.
• Strong collaboration skills with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced environments with changing priorities.
• Curiosity or exposure to AI agents, LLM infrastructure, automation systems, ML/data pipelines, inference pipelines, evals, or adjacent AI systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in high-growth startups or product environments.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM tooling, automation platforms, eval systems, or data/ML pipelines.
• Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration, background automation, reliability platforms, internal tools, or developer productivity platforms.
• Exposure to permissions, approvals, auditability, compliance, or security-sensitive workflows.
• Background in enterprise SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, or workflow-heavy platforms.