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Principal Software Engineer

Rippling
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Bangalore, Indiafull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior individual contributor role at Rippling Global Payroll focused on designing and delivering large-scale, multi-country payroll systems with strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and cross-functional leadership.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive long-term architecture for Global Payroll systems that support multi-country payroll, country-specific rules, local currency workflows, payroll approvals, reporting, and integrations.
  • Lead complex, cross-functional technical initiatives that span payroll, HRIS, time, benefits, finance, compliance, and accounting systems.
  • Design durable platform abstractions that let Rippling launch and scale payroll capabilities across jurisdictions without creating brittle one-off implementations.
  • Improve the reliability, observability, auditability, and operational resilience of payroll systems that customers depend on for accurate and timely pay.
  • Make pragmatic technical tradeoffs in systems where correctness, compliance, latency, maintainability, and speed of product development all matter.
  • Identify and systematically reduce architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, and operational risk across the Global Payroll platform.
  • Partner with product and business leaders to translate customer needs, regulatory complexity, and business strategy into technical direction.
  • Mentor and uplevel engineers across teams through design reviews, code reviews, technical coaching, and clear engineering standards.
  • Stay hands-on with implementation in critical areas, especially where the work is ambiguous, technically risky, or foundational to future scale.
  • Represent strong engineering judgment in planning, prioritization, incident review, and long-term roadmap discussions.

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:Architecture and system designBackend programmingCross-functional leadership

Benefits

  • Not specified in the description.
Last updated Oct 7, 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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