Principal Software Engineer

Global Payroll is one of the most technically and operationally complex product areas at Rippling. The team builds systems that help companies pay employees across countries currencies entities and local compliance regimes while keeping payroll tightly connected to HRIS benefits time finance and accounting workflows.

Customers rely on Global Payroll for high-accuracy compliance-sensitive workflows: calculating payroll incorporating employee changes handling local deductions and taxes generating payslips and reports supporting approvals and off-cycle runs and syncing payroll data into downstream systems such as general ledger and accounting platforms.

The engineering challenge is to build highly reliable auditable country-aware systems that can scale across jurisdictions without creating fragmented local products. This requires strong distributed-systems judgment deep product thinking operational excellence and the ability to design abstractions that make complex payroll workflows feel simple for customers.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years of software engineering experience to help lead the design and development of large-scale mission-critical systems. This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who can operate at high technical depth influence across teams and drive complex engineering initiatives from early problem definition through architecture execution launch and long-term operational ownership. The ideal candidate is not only a strong architect but also someone who remains close to code understands implementation trade-offs mentors other engineers and raises the engineering bar across the organization.

What You Will Do

• Define and drive long-term architecture for Global Payroll systems that support multi-country payroll country-specific rules local currency workflows payroll approvals reporting and integrations.
• Lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives that span payroll HRIS time benefits finance compliance and accounting systems.
• Design durable platform abstractions that let Rippling launch and scale payroll capabilities across jurisdictions without creating brittle one-off implementations.
• Improve the reliability observability auditability and operational resilience of payroll systems that customers depend on for accurate and timely pay.
• Make pragmatic technical tradeoffs in systems where correctness compliance latency maintainability and speed of product development all matter.
• Identify and systematically reduce architectural bottlenecks technical debt and operational risk across the Global Payroll platform.
• Partner with product and business leaders to translate customer needs regulatory complexity and business strategy into technical direction.
• Mentor and uplevel engineers across teams through design reviews code reviews technical coaching and clear engineering standards.
• Stay hands-on with implementation in critical areas especially where the work is ambiguous technically risky or foundational to future scale.
• Represent strong engineering judgment in planning prioritization incident review and long-term roadmap discussions.

What You Need to Have

• 15 years of software engineering experience preferably in backend platform infrastructure distributed systems product engineering or systems engineering.
• Proven experience operating at Senior Staff / Principal / Staff technical scope.
• Deep hands-on engineering foundation with strong coding debugging design and system-building experience.
• Strong programming ability in one or more backend/general-purpose languages such as Python Java Go C Scala Kotlin or C#.
• Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Strong architecture and system design depth across distributed systems APIs databases data modeling concurrency reliability observability and performance.
• Ability to own ambiguous cross-functional multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to make trade-offs across speed quality scale reliability cost and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to influence senior engineers product leaders and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
• Strong mentorship mindset with a track record of raising the technical bar for other engineers.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced high-ambiguity environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience in high-growth hyper-growth or product-led technology companies.
• Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure developer platforms workflow engines data platforms or internal tooling.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure LLM systems automation platforms evaluation frameworks or data-intensive systems.
• Experience with reliability engineering incident management observability performance tuning and operational excellence.
• Experience with security compliance permissions auditability or enterprise-grade systems.
• Prior experience in SaaS fintech HR tech payroll benefits compliance IT data platforms or workflow-heavy domains.
• Ability to operate as a builder-leader someone who can define direction align stakeholders and still stay close to execution.