Senior Software Engineer - AI Initiative

About the Position

Senior Software Engineer - AI Initiative

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 $1.8B+ 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 AI Platform Team

The AI Platform team is one of Rippling's highest-priority engineering investments and sits at the center of the company's broader AI strategy. The team is building the foundational infrastructure that powers AI capabilities across Rippling's entire product ecosystem, including HR, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, IT, Finance, Compliance, and Workforce Management. Rather than building standalone chatbots or simple LLM integrations, the team focuses on creating deeply integrated AI systems that understand Rippling's rich business context, permissions model, workflows, and enterprise data.

The team is developing core platform capabilities such as AI agents, workflow automation engines, evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, data pipelines, and self-healing systems that can identify issues, surface insights, and help automate complex enterprise workflows. These systems operate with real business context, approvals, permissions, and auditability requirements, enabling customers to safely delegate operational tasks while maintaining control and governance.

One of the unique aspects of Rippling AI is that it is built directly on top of Rippling's unified data model and permission system. The platform can reason across HR, IT, Payroll, and Finance data while respecting access controls and providing verifiable outputs. The team is solving challenging problems around agent orchestration, workflow execution, reliability, permissions, evaluations, observability, data quality, and scalable AI infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Build foundational AI platform systems that support Rippling’s broader AI strategy across HR, IT, Finance, payroll, benefits, recruiting, compliance, and internal workflows.
• Work as a deeply hands-on Senior Software Engineer, with around 60% of time expected to be spent coding, debugging, reviewing code, and owning implementation.
• Contribute to the design and build-out of AI platform capabilities such as background agents, automated workflows, evaluation systems, data pipelines, and model quality feedback loops.
• Help build systems that allow AI agents to automate repetitive enterprise workflows with the right permissions, controls, approvals, and auditability.
• Work on platform systems that support self-healing and self-improving workflows, where AI can detect negative product signals and help identify root causes.
• Partner with Staff Engineers, Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders to convert ambiguous product/platform problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Own well-defined to moderately ambiguous components end-to-end - from design and implementation to testing, launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Participate actively in design discussions, code reviews, debugging, production support, and operational improvements.
• Build reliable, scalable, and maintainable backend/platform systems that can support Rippling’s product ecosystem.

Requirements

• 5–8 years of overall software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or product engineering.
• Strong hands-on coding ability; 60% coding is non-negotiable. Must be comfortable writing production-quality code, reviewing code, debugging issues, and owning implementation details.
• Strong programming knowledge in one or more backend/general-purpose languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience building and operating scalable backend/platform systems in production.
• Good understanding of system design, API design, databases, data modeling, concurrency, observability, and production troubleshooting. Ability to independently own well-defined to moderately ambiguous technical problems from design to execution, launch, and iteration.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced product engineering environment with changing priorities and high ownership.
• Strong collaboration skills with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders. Good product judgment and ability to understand how engineering decisions impact customers and business outcomes.
• Ability to contribute to design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, and team quality.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in a high-growth or hyper-growth startup / product-led technology company.
• Recent hands-on exposure to AI agents, LLM tooling, AI infrastructure, automation platforms, evaluation systems, or data/ML pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of Python for AI/ML infrastructure, automation, agents, scripting, evaluations, or data pipelines.
• Strong SQL knowledge for querying, data-heavy systems, analytics, workflow systems, reporting, and enterprise intelligence use cases.
• Experience with Go, Java, C++, or Scala in backend, platform, infrastructure, or distributed systems environments.
• Exposure to TypeScript / JavaScript if the role involves full-stack, internal tooling, dashboards, or product surface ownership.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, background automation, reliability platforms, internal tools, or developer productivity platforms.
• Exposure to permissions, approvals, auditability, compliance, or security-sensitive workflows.
• Prior exposure to fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, enterprise SaaS, or workflow-heavy platforms.
• Clear evidence of learning quickly, taking ownership, and operating well in ambiguous environments.

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Opportunity to work in a fast-growing startup environment
• Collaborative and innovative team culture
• Comprehensive benefits package

About the Company

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 $1.8B+ 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.