Senior Engineering Manager, AI Onboarding

Job description

About the Role We are seeking a deeply technical Senior Engineering Manager to lead the AI Onboarding & Growth engineering team, a high-impact product platform team at the center of Rippling’s next phase of product growth. This team owns some of Rippling’s most important customer-facing experiences, including company onboarding, self-serve activation, product-led growth, and the surfaces that drive adoption of Rippling’s AI products. You will lead the transformation of these experiences from fragmented, manual workflows into intelligent, highly automated product experiences that help customers get value from Rippling faster and unlock new growth opportunities for the business. A major focus of this role will be reinventing company onboarding through AI. Today, onboarding requires customers to work through product-specific implementation steps and provide information across a complex set of workflows. We are building toward an AI-first experience where customers can provide documents and other artifacts up front, and intelligent agents can understand what is required, identify missing information, execute work across products, and continuously move customers toward activation with far less manual effort. At the same time, this team is responsible for building the platform and product experiences that enable self-serve and product-led growth, including helping customers discover, evaluate, purchase, and adopt Rippling products without requiring a traditional sales-led motion. This includes driving adoption of Rippling AI across the product and creating the shared infrastructure and experiences that allow new Rippling products to scale efficiently. What We Build We build the product experiences and platform capabilities that make Rippling easier to adopt, easier to expand, and increasingly intelligent. Our core product domains include: AI-Powered Company Onboarding: Building the next generation of company onboarding around AI agents that can ingest customer-provided documents and artifacts, understand product-specific requirements, identify missing information, orchestrate workflows across Rippling products, and automate implementation tasks. The goal is to turn a complex, multi-product implementation process into a highly automated customer experience. Self-Serve & Product-Led Growth: Creating the shared product infrastructure and customer experiences that allow companies to discover, evaluate, purchase, activate, and expand Rippling products with less dependency on sales and implementation teams. This includes building the platform capabilities required to support standalone products and new entry points into the Rippling ecosystem. AI Adoption & Growth: Building product surfaces, experiences, and experimentation infrastructure that increase awareness, engagement, and adoption of Rippling AI across the broader Rippling product portfolio. This team will help make AI a natural and valuable part of the customer experience, rather than a separate destination. Shared Product Experiences & Platform: Owning globally consistent customer-facing surfaces such as onboarding, navigation, home, company settings, and other shared experiences, as well as the platform abstractions that allow product teams across Rippling to integrate with them. The team is responsible for creating reusable patterns rather than solving bespoke problems for individual products. Cross-Product Product Infrastructure: Developing the APIs, abstractions, data models, registries, workflow systems, and other platform primitives that allow dozens of Rippling products to work together through a coherent experience. This includes identifying common patterns across diverse product requirements and building systems that can scale as Rippling continues to launch new products. You will lead a highly capable, senior-heavy engineering team operating at the intersection of product, platform, AI, and growth. The work requires both deep technical judgment and strong product instincts, with a high degree of leverage across the broader engineering organization. What You Will Do Lead and Mentor: Build and lead a high-performing team of senior engineers working across AI, onboarding, growth, and product platform infrastructure. Develop technical leaders who can independently own ambiguous, cross-functional problems and raise the execution bar across the organization. Own AI-First Onboarding: Set the technical direction for transforming company onboarding into an AI-native experience. Define the architecture, abstractions, APIs, agent interfaces, and platform primitives required for AI systems to understand customer-provided information, orchestrate product workflows, validate completion, and progressively automate implementation. Drive Product-Led Growth: Partner closely with Product and Design to build self-serve and PLG experiences that increase activation, conversion, expansion, and time-to-value. Help evolve Rippling from a primarily sales-assisted onboarding motion toward a more scalable, product-led model. Drive AI Adoption Across Rippling: Build the shared experiences and growth mechanisms that make Rippling AI discoverable, useful, and deeply integrated into customers’ day-to-day workflows. Establish the technical foundations needed to measure and improve AI adoption across the product. Build Scalable Product Platforms: Identify common patterns across Rippling’s product teams and turn them into durable platform abstractions. Make it easy for dozens of product teams to integrate with shared experiences without requiring the platform team to build bespoke solutions for every request. Own High-Traffic Customer Experiences: Set the technical and product direction for critical customer-facing surfaces, balancing usability, performance, reliability, experimentation velocity, and architectural quality across some of Rippling’s most heavily trafficked experiences. Stay Deeply Technical: Participate directly in architecture and system design, particularly across distributed systems, workflow orchestration, APIs, data models, agentic systems, observability, and platform abstractions. Maintain enough technical depth to challenge designs, evaluate trade-offs, and partner effectively with senior staff engineers. Partner Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Product, Design, Data, AI, Growth, and engineering leaders across Rippling’s product organizations. Build alignment across teams with different priorities and determine when to build a shared platform capability, when to enable another team to own a solution, and when to say no. Shape Technical Strategy: Help define the long-term architecture and product strategy for a newly expanding team charter. Bring clarity to ambiguous problem spaces, establish durable technical principles, and ensure the team remains focused on the highest-leverage opportunities. What You Will Need Exceptional Engineering Leadership: Proven experience leading strong engineering teams in fast-moving environments, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent while maintaining a high bar for execution and technical quality. Deep Technical Foundation: Strong technical depth in backend systems, distributed architecture, APIs, workflow systems, platform infrastructure, and production engineering. You should be comfortable operating alongside Staff+ engineers and making system-level architectural decisions. AI-Native Product & Engineering Mindset: Strong understanding of modern AI application patterns and a demonstrated ability to use AI to fundamentally rethink product workflows, not simply add AI features to existing experiences. Experience with agents, LLM-powered applications, AI developer workflows, or intelligent automation is highly valuable. Strong Product Sense: Ability to reason from customer problems and business outcomes, not just technical requirements. You should enjoy owning customer-facing product experiences while also thinking deeply about the underlying systems and abstractions. Platform Thinking: Experience building or leading product platforms that serve multiple teams, with strong judgment around abstractions, reuse, extensibility, and platform adoption. You should be comfortable balancing generalized platform capabilities against the needs of individual product teams. Exceptional Ambiguity Tolerance: Ability to create clarity and carve out strategy in a rapidly evolving charter. You should be comfortable operating where the boundaries between product, platform, AI, and growth are not always neatly defined. Cross-Functional Leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders across engineering, product, design, and business functions, especially when teams have competing requirements or opinions about the right product and technical direction. Data-Driven Problem Solving: Strong reliance on experimentation, product analytics, observability, and operational metrics to understand customer behavior, system performance, and business outcomes. Strong Executive Communication: Ability to translate complex technical and product decisions into crisp narratives that create alignment with engineering leadership, product executives, and cross-functional partners. Growth Orientation: Experience operating in environments where activation, conversion, adoption, expansion, or other customer growth metrics are important inputs to engineering and product strategy is a strong plus. Additional Information Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role. This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here . A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below. *Commission is not guaranteed 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. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @ addresses.