What you will need

• AI product mindset: Curiosity and experience applying AI to improve product experiences, automate workflows, surface insights, or make complex systems easier for users to understand and navigate.
• Proven engineering leadership: Experience leading organizations of 10+ engineers, including senior and staff-level engineers, in high-scale distributed systems environments.
• Platform-building mindset: Experience building shared platforms, APIs, or foundational capabilities that enable multiple product teams to move faster and avoid duplicated infrastructure.
• Strong product sense: Ability to balance technical excellence with user experience and business outcomes, particularly in product-heavy engineering organizations.
• Architectural leadership: Demonstrated ability to define and evolve the architecture of complex, highly available systems while making pragmatic tradeoffs between platform investment and near-term product velocity.
• Experience building great experiences: A track record of turning complex workflows into simple, intuitive, and performant product experiences.
• Operational rigor: High bar for reliability, correctness, observability, and system resilience—especially in critical financial or transactional systems.
• Experience with mission-critical systems: Background in payments, fintech, payroll, banking, or similarly complex domains is preferred but not required.
• Cross-functional leadership: Track record of partnering effectively with Product, Design, and other engineering teams to define and deliver end-to-end systems.
• Global collaboration: Comfortable leading distributed teams and navigating complex workflows across time zones and geographies.
• Strong communication and ownership: Ability to operate with autonomy, create clarity in ambiguous spaces, influence senior stakeholders, and set direction for a large technical domain.

Additional Information

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.