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 @Rippling.com addresses.

About The Role

The App Components Team is a forward-thinking, platform-focused product engineering team dedicated to crafting the cohesive, high-performing building blocks that define Rippling’s "Enterprise Studio" experience.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer (Backend / Full Stack) to lead the architectural vision and technical execution of the systems that power these components. While your primary focus will be on the backend, this is a truly full-stack role. You will not only design the distributed systems that power our platform but also dive deep into React and React Native to implement the end-to-end experience.

You will be responsible for designing abstract data models, scalable APIs, and the UI components that consume them—ensuring that the complex backend logic is translated into a seamless, high-performance user experience.

What You Will Do

• Architect and Build: Drive the architectural vision for the App Components platform. You will design and implement scalable services using Python and Golang that can handle complex enterprise data modeling.
• Experience with Scale: Familiarity with the challenges of distributed systems (using technologies like Kafka, Flink, and AWS)
• Operate Across the Stack: While your depth is in the backend, you will actively contribute to the frontend codebase. You will write high-quality React and React Native code to ship complete features, ensuring that the architectural complexity is abstracted away into intuitive, high-performance UI components.
• Navigate Ambiguity: Take ownership of major product initiatives from vague requirements to concrete technical designs. You will decide how we model data for "App Studio" features that don't exist yet and build the full solution.
• Elevate Engineering Standards: Champion best practices for building distributed systems and secure APIs. You will mentor senior engineers, conduct deep code reviews (across both backend and frontend), and drive technical excellence across the team.
• Drive Cross-Functional Impact: Partner with Product and Design to deconstruct complex user problems. You will ensure that the components we build are not just technically sound, but practically useful for product teams building on top of them.

What You Will Need

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building production systems at scale.
• Deep Backend Expertise: Proficiency in building complex distributed services. Experience with our stack—Python, Django, Golang, MongoDB and AWS—is highly preferred.
• Solid Frontend Proficiency: You are comfortable writing and shipping production code in React and React Native. You don't just consume APIs; you understand component lifecycles, state management, and mobile constraints, and you can build the UI required to demonstrate your backend features.
• System Design: Expertise in designing scalable architecture. You can discuss trade-offs between eventual vs. strong consistency, choose the right database for the job, and design for failure in distributed systems.
• Platform Mindset: Experience building tools, frameworks, or platforms that other developers use. You understand how to build flexible "0 to 1" components that scale to "1 to 100".
• Leadership: A history of influencing technical decisions across a wide organization and mentoring other engineers to grow their skills in both backend architecture and full-stack implementation.
• Communication: Excellent ability to communicate complex technical ideas with clarity and precision to both technical and non-technical audiences.