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Principal Security Engineer

Rippling
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San Francisco, CA$207k - $345kfull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Principal Security Engineer at Rippling, reporting to the CSO, leading cross-cutting security initiatives across security, AI, infrastructure, identity, developer experience, internal tooling, and third-party SaaS systems. Hands-on role blending architecture and implementation to design and ship security solutions at scale.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the architecture and implementation of complex security initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams and technical domains.
  • Incorporate the use of agentic AI technologies into security capabilities within both product and infrastructure technologies.
  • Help business leaders understand and navigate risk tradeoffs to ensure Rippling is making well informed security decisions.
  • Design scalable security systems across areas such as identity and access management, cloud infrastructure, internal tooling, developer infrastructure, and third-party SaaS.
  • Translate ambiguous or fragmented security problems into clear technical architectures, roadmaps, and executable engineering plans.
  • Rationalize requirements and technical roadmaps across three or more teams into cohesive systems and long-term solutions.
  • Partner with senior engineers and engineering leaders across Security, Infrastructure, Developer Experience, IT, and Product to drive alignment on critical technical decisions.
  • Build prototypes, write production code, and remain hands-on throughout the lifecycle of the systems you design.
  • Identify architectural weaknesses and systemic security risks before they become incidents, then drive durable engineering solutions.
  • Establish technical patterns and frameworks that improve security while allowing engineering teams to continue moving quickly.
  • Raise the technical bar across the security organization through design reviews, mentorship, and influence across engineering.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience designing, building, and operating complex systems in large-scale cloud or enterprise environments.
  • A track record of leading technically complex initiatives involving multiple engineering teams, competing requirements, and cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Deep expertise in one or more security domains, with IAM, authentication, authorization, or identity architecture experience particularly relevant.
  • Strong understanding of modern cloud and enterprise architecture, including security boundaries, workload isolation, service-to-service communication, and access-control systems.
  • Recent hands-on engineering experience and the ability to prototype, write code, and work directly with modern development tooling.
  • Experience building defensive agentic systems and integrating them with dynamic software development and operations.
  • Ability to move fluidly between high-level system architecture and detailed implementation decisions.
  • Strong technical judgment and the ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs between security, scalability, developer experience, and business needs.
  • Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical stakeholders without relying on organizational authority.
  • High degree of ownership, urgency, and bias toward action in ambiguous environments.
  • 10+ years experience solving complex engineering and security problems.

Skills

Required:Designing and building complex systemsIAM / authentication / authorizationAgentic AI integrationCloud and enterprise architecturePrototyping and hands-on codingInfluence without authorityRisk management and decision-making
Last updated Sep 23, 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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