Staff Software Engineer

You will be the primary technical authority for Search at Rippling, designing cross-platform search primitives that will power the next generation of our product features. You will partner with the Product leadership to influence the roadmap, ensuring Search capabilities are a competitive advantage for our product suite. You will own architecture and execution for indexing, retrieval, relevance/ranking, and query performance at scale. You'll partner across with Product leadership Data Cloud, platform, and AI/product teams to build shared search primitives that power multiple product surfaces.

What you will do

• Define and lead the technical vision for Rippling search systems: indexing pipelines, query serving, ranking/relevance, and retrieval quality measurement
• Tackle open-ended challenges in hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, and metadata ranking to push the boundaries of what our platform can do.
• Build and operate resilient, high-performance infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) capable of supporting 10x scale growth while maintaining rigorous standards for latency, freshness, correctness and cost-efficiency.
• Define relevance strategy and evaluation: offline benchmarks, quality metrics, and production monitoring.
• Build reusable search platform abstractions used by multiple Rippling products.
• Elevate the entire engineering organization through strategic design reviews, mentorship, and the establishment of "best-in-class" operational standards.

• 8+ years in backend/platform engineering with ownership of distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience in search infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene-style systems), indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Strong systems design fundamentals: storage/index design, query execution, performance optimization, and reliability engineering.
• Experience with data platforms and schema-rich systems, including large-scale ingestion and serving paths.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or Java).
• Strong cross-functional execution and ability to lead ambiguous multi-team platform initiatives.

Nice to have

• Hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, or ML-assisted ranking experience.
• Experience with analytics/query ecosystems (e.g., Trino/Presto, Kafka, Iceberg, Spark).
• Experience building discoverability products such as catalog search, field selection, metadata ranking.

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.

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.