Staff Software Engineer - Global Payroll

Payroll is the most critical financial transaction between a company and its people. The Rippling Payroll Calculations team is the engine at the heart of this process, responsible for accurately calculating every component of a paycheck-from earnings and deductions to complex taxes and withholdings-for employees worldwide. This engine is mission-critical, processing billions of dollars and integrating deeply with HRIS, Benefits, and Time & Attendance.

We are building this calculation engine to be a scalable, global platform, enabling Rippling to launch new countries rapidly and reliably.

As a Staff Engineer on this team, you will be a key technical leader shaping the future of this core platform. You will be responsible for the architecture, scalability, and long-term technical vision of the calculation services. Your work will directly impact our ability to scale globally, ensure 100% accuracy, and build the foundational framework that all other payroll product teams rely on.

What You Will Do

• Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our global payroll calculation engine, designing scalable frameworks that support operations across multiple countries.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features, from initial design and technical specifications through to production deployment and monitoring.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the Calculations team, identifying and tackling performance bottlenecks, reliability improvements, and architectural refactors.
• Take on ambiguous technical challenges (e.g., "design a system to support any country's tax model") and turn them into concrete, actionable plans for the team.
• Exercise expert technical judgment in building scalable, maintainable, and extensible systems, ensuring data integrity across complex and interdependent services.
• Raise the engineering bar for the entire organization by mentoring senior and junior engineers, leading in-depth design reviews, and championing best practices for code quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate across functions with Product Management, HRIS, and other engineering leaders to deliver cohesive, platform-wide solutions., businesses can automate all of the manual work they normally need to do to make employee changes

• 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a proven track record of technical leadership and driving org-wide impact.
• Expertise in building large-scale, distributed backend systems. Strong proficiency in Python and Django is highly preferred.
• Experience managing the complete project lifecycle, transforming intricate ideas and ambiguous requirements into successful launches independently.
• Deep expertise in system architecture, data modeling, and building core services with clean abstractions.
• A keen product sense and a passion for advocating for the customer, with experience building robust systems that directly impact business-critical flows.
• Outstanding capacity to convey intricate technical concepts clearly and precisely, both in writing and verbally, to diverse functional teams.
• Experience with MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases is a strong plus.

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.

The pay range for this role is:

180,000 - 315,000 USD per year(US Tier 1)

189,000 - 330,750 USD per year(US San Francisco Bay Area)

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.