About RipplingRippling 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 @Rippling.com addresses.
About the rolePayroll Data is the heartbeat of Rippling's Global Payroll product ecosystem. It is the source of truth that powers everything from standard reports, tax filings and accounting integrations to complex custom reporting and our new AI capabilities. We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for scaling this critical infrastructure.
You will lead the Payroll Data team, sitting at the intersection of Product Engineering and Data Infrastructure. Your mandate is to build a robust, scalable, and generic data platform that serves millions of employees globally. You will oversee the pipelines that feed downstream systems (Tax, Accounting, Billing, Object Graph), the feedback loops to upstream products (Time & Attendance, Benefits), and the data query layer that powers both real-time and batch reporting.
This is a role for a leader who spans the gap between product and infrastructure-someone who can architect high-scale data infra along with materialization & aggregation layers while understanding the complex domain logic of Payroll. You will partner deeply with our Platform and AI teams to ensure data correctness, completeness, ensuring observability, and reliability are baked into the core of our system.
What you will do- Scale and Build the Team: Grow a high-performing team from 4 to 10+ engineers over the next year, hiring top talent in SF and establishing a culture of technical rigor and operational excellence.
- Architect the Data Strategy: Partner with Principal and Staff engineers to design a unified data query layer that seamlessly combines batch and real-time processing, moving away from scattered solutions to a cohesive platform.
- Build, Own the Infra & Pipelines: Build underlying ETL infra & manage the end-to-end lifecycle of critical data pipelines, including those for pay stubs, standard/custom reports, downstream tax/accounting integrations, and our cutting-edge AI systems.
- Drive Non-Functional Excellence: Go beyond feature delivery to obsess over the "ilities"-scalability, observability, reusability, and debuggability. You will ensure our data infrastructure is reliable and easy to build upon.
- Bridge the Gap: Act as the technical liaison between Payroll and the Core Platform org (Object Graph, Reporting, RQL). You will articulate complex design decisions and influence the roadmap for how payroll data is stored and accessed.
- Execute on High-Impact Initiatives: Lead the team in extending data platform capabilities, solving deep interoperability problems, and migrating legacy data flows to modern, performant standards.
What you will need- Engineering Management Experience: 5+ years of management experience, with a track record of leading teams that blend product engineering with backend infrastructure.
- Data Infrastructure Background: Deep technical experience in data engineering, data pipelines, or ETL systems. You have likely worked at data-focused companies building complex data products.
- Technical Depth: You are hands-on enough to dive into design discussions with Staff engineers regarding data materialization, schema design, and system interoperability. You understand the trade-offs between batch and real-time systems.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to collaborate across time zones and functions. You can effectively align goals with AI, Platform, and external vendor integration teams.
- Product-Platform Hybrid Mindset: You understand that you are building internal platforms that serve product needs. You care about the developer experience of the engineers consuming your data as much as the end-user experience.
Additional InformationRippling 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.
The pay range for this role is:
198,000 - 346,500 USD per year (US)
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