Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

Overview

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 $1.85B 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 official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About the role:

Rippling is the system of record for employee data - a complete Employee Management System. To solve this broad problem, a variety of applications and datasets need to come together as a graph connected through the employee record at its center.

The Data Infrastructure Team is a lean, high-impact group operating in a true founder mode. We are responsible for building and safeguarding all data systems, managing the lifecycle of 500+ production-grade resources across 10+ types of data stores. Our core mission is to build self-serve, automated platforms that ensure our systems are efficient, scalable, and continuously evolving. We don’t just operate systems—we invent them.

What You'll Do:

• Invent, design, and build self-serve, automated platforms for managing the lifecycle of 500+ production-grade data resources across 10+ data store types.
• Drive innovation by engineering foundational tooling for all engineering teams, such as the Database Proxy and the database replication services.
• Pioneer and execute complex projects like large-scale, zero-downtime database migrations.
• Go deep into technical architecture, distributed systems, protocol-level debugging, and performance optimization to ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient at petabyte scale.
• Build and maintain the core foundations for strategic initiatives, including multi-region architecture, sandbox environments, and a comprehensive, Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code platform.
• Focus intensely on performance, observability, cost and operability to maintain infrastructure that just works, even when handling 75 billion queries/day and 10 PB of data transfer.
• Write core libraries like middlewares, ORMs, proxies, rate limiters, shard routers (in Python and Go) to support scalability and developer experience.
• Take end-to-end ownership of projects, from initial design and planning to successful rollout and operation.
  
  

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of professional work experience.
• Experience working in a fast paced, dynamic environment.
• Experience in building projects with good abstractions and architecture.
• Comfortable at developing scalable and extendable core services used in many products.
  
  

If you don’t meet all of the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply. No job description is perfect, and we might find an even more suitable opportunity that matches your skills and experience.