Staff Software Engineer Rippling AI

About the role

Rippling is building core AI Platform infrastructure that will power intelligent and automated experiences across the company. This includes background agents automated workflows evaluation systems data pipelines model-quality loops sandboxing scaling latency reliability and platform primitives that other product teams can build on.

As a Staff Software Engineer you will operate as a hands-on technical leader. You will own ambiguous platform problems lead cross-functional initiatives shape architecture and continue to write/review/debug production code. This role is not for someone who wants to only advise or delegate.

What you will do

• Own major AI Platform initiatives across backend platform infrastructure and AI-enabled systems.
• Lead design and execution for systems supporting agents evals automation data pipelines model quality sandboxing scaling latency and reliability.
• Act as a technical lead for cross-functional work involving Product Infra Platform AI and Engineering teams.
• Break down ambiguous technical problems into clear architecture and execution plans.
• Write code review critical code paths debug production issues and make implementation-level decisions.
• Build platform systems that can be reused by multiple product teams across Rippling.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews code reviews mentoring and technical guidance.
• Balance speed quality reliability and long-term platform maintainability.

Qualifications

• 1015 years of software engineering experience preferably in backend platform infrastructure distributed systems AI platform or product engineering.
• Strong hands-on coding ability; must be willing to remain close to code debugging design reviews and implementation details.
• Strong programming knowledge in one or more languages such as Python Java Go/Golang C Scala Kotlin or C#.
• Proven experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience in high-growth or hyper-growth startup/product environments is strongly preferred.
• Strong system design and architecture fundamentals across APIs databases data modeling concurrency reliability observability and production operations.
• Ability to lead ambiguous cross-functional technical initiatives without formal authority.
• Strong product intuition and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business impact.
• Ability to mentor engineers and raise the technical bar while continuing to code.
• Practical exposure or strong curiosity around AI agents LLM infrastructure agentic workflows ML/data infrastructure inference pipelines evals fine-tuning post-training or automation systems.

Preferred qualifications

• Recent hands-on experience building AI agents LLM tooling AI infrastructure automation platforms eval systems or model-quality systems.
• Experience with workflow orchestration background automation self-healing systems reliability platforms or internal developer platforms.
• Experience with permissions approvals auditability compliance security-sensitive workflows or enterprise-grade controls.
• Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
• Experience with Go Java C or Scala in platform infrastructure distributed systems or large-scale backend environments.
• Experience in AI-native cloud/infra platform-heavy enterprise SaaS fintech HR tech payroll benefits compliance IT or workflow-heavy companies.

Required Experience:

Staff IC