Senior Engineering Manager Payments Experience

Rippling is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager (M8) to lead the transformation of Payments Experience owning the layer that powers how employers employees and contractors move money.

You will define a new standard for how people interact with money at Rippling. You will build experiences that are performant intuitive and AI-first abstracting away the complexity of payments while giving users clear answers proactive guidance and simple paths to resolution when things go wrong.

This team sits at the center of one of Ripplings most critical workflows bridging payroll logic and the underlying payment processing systems to ensure money moves accurately reliably and at scale. Your mandate will go beyond building experiences for individual products: you will platformize payments into reusable capabilities that can power any fintech product at Rippling creating common primitives workflows and abstractions that allow teams to build and launch new financial products faster while increasingly bringing existing product payment experiences onto this shared platform and owning that experience end-to-end over time.

This is a highly cross-functional role partnering closely with Money Movement Tax Contractor and Global Payroll teams. You will own the full-stack experience for employers and their employees and contractors while driving innovation in new product areas like contractor wallets and modern payout methods.

This is a unique opportunity to be the first leader fully owning Payments Experience at Rippling shaping the strategy architecture organization and product direction for a critical and rapidly growing domain.

• Own the Payments experience: Lead the systems and product layer that define how money moves through execution readiness status recovery and user-facing resolution.
• Build AI-first experiences: Use AI to make payments more proactive and understandablesurfacing anomalies explaining payment outcomes anticipating issues answering questions and helping users resolve problems without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
• Platformize and unify payments experience across Rippling: Build reusable payment capabilities APIs workflows and abstractions that can be leveraged across Ripplings fintech products enabling teams to launch new financial products faster while gradually bringing existing product-specific payment experiences onto a common platform and taking increasing end-to-end ownership of the unified experience over time.
• Shape long-term strategy: Define the roadmap for Payments Experience and the broader payments platform with the opportunity to expand ownership into additional product-layer payment experiences across Rippling.
• Define the product/platform boundary: Establish the architecture and operating model that separates shared payment capabilities from product-specific logic enabling teams across Rippling to build new financial products quickly and consistently.
• Build a world-class payments experience: Create fast intuitive and easy-to-understand experiences that abstract away payment complexity while maintaining high standards for latency reliability resilience and global-scale performance.
• Build the future of contractor payments: Own the Balance (wallet) product enabling contractors to receive and manage earnings across multiple clients with modern withdrawal methods like crypto instant transfer payment methods and more in the future.
• Operate at global scale: Work with globally distributed engineering and non-engineering teams and ensure reliability across high-volume payment systems with a strong focus on operational excellence observability fault tolerance and recovery

• 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 resilienceespecially 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.

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race religion color national origin ancestry physical disability mental disability medical condition genetic information marital status sex gender gender identity gender expression age sexual orientation veteran or military status or any other legally protected characteristics Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation please email

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 employees 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; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someones compensationincluding a candidates professional background experience and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.

Required Experience:

Manager