Director of Engineering - Platform Engineering San Francisco, CA

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

Rippling platform operates as a scaled team which owns and operates a variety of mission‑critical systems. We support close to 1,000 Engineers building products and internal platforms at Rippling and deliver the most foundational shared systems inside the Platform organization. Built on top of a dynamically stitched and user‑permissioned ontology, a performant and scalable object platform store, an event‑driven dependency tracking system, and Rippling Query Language (RQL), our platform offers many shared systems and building blocks for entire clouds of products at Rippling. Teams include automation (workflows and approvals), group management, object platform, application building, search and AI platform, object graph (ontology) and data cataloging, and more.

We are actively hiring into multiple teams and will continue expanding into 2025.

We are looking for a leader who can further unlock the potential of the team by investing in robustly scaling distributed systems, world‑class operations and delivering large platform leverage to internal teams. This role also facilitates the platform as a product and optimizing delivery around an impactful roadmap very closely aligned around strategic and executive priorities. The ideal candidate can guide teams to delivering multi‑quarter deliverables in a way which ships regular, incremental value and has the customer obsession and technical depth to bridge the gap between stakeholder needs and technical capability. They are a visionary leader who obsesses about great execution and building winning teams.

What You’ll Do

Acting as a technical leader within the Engineering organization.

Identifying and advocating for high impact projects that involve multiple stakeholders across the organization.

Taking ambiguous technical and organizational problem statements, turning them into an actionable plan and then executing on it with the team.

Executing and driving alignment against requirements involving complex and interdependent systems related to internal development platforms, the infrastructure which underpin them and the developer tools that support them.

Qualifications

A minimum 10 years of experience in engineering, delivering impactful products

A minimum 6 years of experience building and managing high‑performing engineering teams

Hands‑on experience with building distributed systems, APIs, and working knowledge of AWS & cloud‑based SaaS applications

Effectiveness at leading and executing large & complex technical initiatives

Experience in taking an idea and turning them into impactful products

Experience working in a fast‑paced & dynamic environment

Proficiency in recruiting, organizing, and motivating teams

Strong product intuition and experience collaborating with cross‑functional engineering teams

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