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Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Calculation

Rippling· Engineering
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New York, NY$189k - $315kfull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Staff-level technical leadership role focused on designing, building, and scaling Rippling’s payroll calculation systems for global, enterprise-scale payroll. Responsible for architecture, execution, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure accurate, auditable, and explainable payroll at scale.

Responsibilities

  • Lead architecture and technical strategy for Rippling’s payroll calculation systems.
  • Write critical production code and lead from the front on high-impact technical initiatives.
  • Design frameworks that make payroll logic configurable, versioned, testable, explainable, scalable, and easy to debug.
  • Leverage AI to make payroll logic easier to build, validate, explain, and operate, without compromising accuracy, auditability, or control.
  • Build systems that support enterprise-scale payroll for large employers with complex legal-entity structures and approval workflows.
  • Help expand Rippling’s native payroll capabilities across new countries and jurisdictions.
  • Drive improvements in distributed systems, database performance, caching, reliability, and operability.
  • Partner cross-functionally with product, design, payroll operations, HRIS, and other engineering teams to deliver end-to-end customer outcomes.
  • Mentor senior and mid-level engineers across payroll calculation areas such as platform, earnings, deductions, taxes, and jurisdiction-specific logic.

Qualifications

  • Staff-level experience designing and scaling complex production systems where correctness and auditability are critical.
  • Strong engineering fundamentals across architecture, data modeling, distributed systems, databases, caching, and reliability.
  • Track record of setting technical direction and leading complex initiatives across multiple teams.
  • Strong product judgment and the ability to connect platform decisions to customer outcomes.
  • Excellent communication skills and comfort driving alignment across engineering, product, and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment where priorities and requirements evolve quickly.
  • Payroll experience is helpful but not required. We value engineers who have worked on other high-integrity domains where correctness, auditability, and customer trust are essential.

Skills

Required:Architecture leadershipDistributed systemsData modelingCaching and performanceProduct alignmentCross-functional collaboration
Nice to have:Mentoring
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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