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 $1.8B+ 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 @Rippling.com addresses.

About the AI Platform Team

The AI Platform team is one of Rippling's highest-priority engineering investments and sits at the center of the company's broader AI strategy. The team is building the foundational infrastructure that powers AI capabilities across Rippling's entire product ecosystem, including HR, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, IT, Finance, Compliance, and Workforce Management. Rather than building standalone chatbots or simple LLM integrations, the team focuses on creating deeply integrated AI systems that understand Rippling's rich business context, permissions model, workflows, and enterprise data.

The team is developing core platform capabilities such as AI agents, workflow automation engines, evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, data pipelines, and self-healing systems that can identify issues, surface insights, and help automate complex enterprise workflows. These systems operate with real business context, approvals, permissions, and auditability requirements, enabling customers to safely delegate operational tasks while maintaining control and governance.

One of the unique aspects of Rippling AI is that it is built directly on top of Rippling's unified data model and permission system. The platform can reason across HR, IT, Payroll, and Finance data while respecting access controls and providing verifiable outputs. The team is solving challenging problems around agent orchestration, workflow execution, reliability, permissions, evaluations, observability, data quality, and scalable AI infrastructure.

About the role

Rippling is building foundational AI Platform systems that will support AI capabilities across Payroll, Benefits, HR Products, Talent, Spend, IT, and Data Cloud.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the AI Platform team, you will own production components end-to-end and help build scalable backend/platform systems for AI agents, automated workflows, evals, data pipelines, sandboxing, reliability, and model-quality infrastructure.

This is a deeply hands-on engineering role where 60% coding is non-negotiable. We are looking for engineers who can independently own components, operate in ambiguity, and grow toward Staff-level technical ownership over time.

What you will do

Build scalable backend and platform systems for Rippling’s AI Platform.
Own components and services end-to-end — from design and implementation to launch, monitoring, and iteration.
Work on foundational AI systems such as background agents, automated workflows, eval frameworks, data pipelines, reliability systems, and model-quality feedback loops.
Partner with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders to translate ambiguous problems into production-ready systems.
Write production-quality code, review code, debug issues, and improve system reliability.
Contribute to system design and architecture discussions.
Improve observability, operational maturity, scalability, and performance of AI platform systems.
Mentor junior engineers and help raise the quality bar through reviews and technical guidance.

Qualifications

5–8 years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or product engineering.
Strong hands-on coding ability; 60% coding expectation is non-negotiable.
Strong programming knowledge in one or more languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
Experience building and operating scalable backend/platform systems in production.
Good system design fundamentals across APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, observability, debugging, and production operations.
Ability to independently own well-defined to moderately ambiguous technical problems.
Strong collaboration with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders.
Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with changing priorities and high ownership.
Practical curiosity or exposure to AI agents, LLM infrastructure, automation systems, ML/data infrastructure, inference pipelines, evals, or adjacent AI systems.

Preferred qualifications

Prior experience in high-growth or hyper-growth product/startup environments.
Experience with AI agents, LLM tooling, AI infrastructure, automation platforms, eval systems, or data/ML pipelines.
Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
Experience with workflow orchestration, background automation, reliability platforms, internal tools, or developer productivity platforms.
Exposure to permissions, approvals, auditability, compliance, or security-sensitive workflows.
Prior exposure to enterprise SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, or workflow-heavy platforms.

Senior Software Engineer - AI Platform