Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

Rippling's Tax Platform is one of only ~5 companies globally that owns the full tax calculation and filing stack. We process over $30 billion in annual payroll for 1 million+ employees, growing at 50% year-over-year.

Responsibilities

• System Design: Lead architecture for mission-critical systems handling billions in tax calculations; define strategies to scale the platform for rapid growth.
• Ownership & Impact: Drive initiatives with function-wide visibility; shape roadmaps and influence company strategy directly.
• Engineering Excellence: Define and champion engineering standards across teams; establish scalable patterns that set the industry bar.
• Reliability & Correctness: Design systems where failure is not an option, focusing on auditability, correctness, and graceful degradation at scale.
• Global Scale: Tackle architectural challenges of processing millions of payroll transactions across multiple countries with 4,000+ jurisdictions and evolving regulations.
• Technical Leadership: Serve as the technical voice in cross-functional decisions; translate business needs into robust technical strategy.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Proven ability to architect large-scale distributed systems with high reliability requirements.
• Deep expertise in any OOPs language and a track record of designing systems that other engineers build upon.
• Strong ownership mindset; seeing problems through from identification to resolution.
• Rigorous engineering practices focused on correctness, testing, and operational excellence.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to represent engineering vision to leadership and stakeholders.