Principal Software Engineer

Job description

About Rippling Global Payroll Global Payroll is one of the most technically and operationally complex product areas at Rippling. The team builds systems that help companies pay employees across countries, currencies, entities, and local compliance regimes while keeping payroll tightly connected to HRIS, benefits, time, finance, and accounting workflows. Customers rely on Global Payroll for high-accuracy, compliance-sensitive workflows: calculating payroll, incorporating employee changes, handling local deductions and taxes, generating payslips and reports, supporting approvals and off-cycle runs, and syncing payroll data into downstream systems such as general ledger and accounting platforms. The engineering challenge is to build highly reliable, auditable, country-aware systems that can scale across jurisdictions without creating fragmented local products. This requires strong distributed-systems judgment, deep product thinking, operational excellence, and the ability to design abstractions that make complex payroll workflows feel simple for customers. The Opportunity We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer with 15+ years of software engineering experience to help lead the design and development of large-scale, mission-critical systems. This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who can operate at high technical depth, influence across teams, and drive complex engineering initiatives from early problem definition through architecture, execution, launch, and long-term operational ownership. The ideal candidate is not only a strong architect, but also someone who remains close to code, understands implementation trade-offs, mentors other engineers, and raises the engineering bar across the organization. What You Will Do 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. What You Need to Have 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. What Would Be Nice To Have Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies. Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers. Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow engines, data platforms, or internal tooling. Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, LLM systems, automation platforms, evaluation frameworks, or data-intensive systems. Experience with reliability engineering, incident management, observability, performance tuning, and operational excellence. Experience with security, compliance, permissions, auditability, or enterprise-grade systems. Prior experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains. Ability to operate as a “builder-leader” — someone who can define direction, align stakeholders, and still stay close to execution. About Rippling Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes. We prioritize candidate safety. 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