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Senior Staff Software Engineer

Rippling· Engineering
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Bangalorefull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior individual contributor role to design and develop large-scale, mission-critical systems; lead architecture and technical strategy while remaining close to code and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

  • Own broad, ambiguous, and high-impact technical charters across multiple teams or systems.
  • Design and build scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
  • Lead architecture and technical strategy for critical platform, backend, infrastructure, or product engineering initiatives.
  • Break down complex technical problems into clear execution plans.
  • Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and business stakeholders.
  • Make high-quality technical decisions around scale, reliability, performance, latency, availability, observability, and long-term maintainability.
  • Stay meaningfully hands-on through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, prototyping, and implementation-level decision-making.
  • Identify technical risks early and drive alignment on durable solutions.
  • Mentor Staff, Senior, and mid-level engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team.
  • Establish engineering best practices, reusable patterns, and high standards for design, coding, testing, and operations.
  • Influence technical direction without relying on formal authority.
  • Improve system quality through better architecture, operational maturity, incident learnings, and platform-level thinking.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Software engineering (15+ years)Programming languagesArchitecture and system designLeadership and mentorshipcross-functional collaboration
Last updated Sep 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Rippling

#1 Workforce Management System | HR, IT, Finance

Rippling eliminates the friction from running a business, combining HR, IT, and Finance apps on a unified data platform.

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