Senior Software Engineer - Traffic

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

The Traffic Infrastructure team is responsible for the lifecycle of every request that enters our ecosystem. We manage the critical path between our users and our services, overseeing our global edge network, service mesh, and internal load-balancing layers. You will have the opportunity to work at the framework and controller level, building the underlying systems that handle traffic shaping, API reliability, and secure service communication. You won’t just be using tools; you’ll be building the abstractions that our entire engineering org uses to deploy and scale their features. Our current stack leans heavily on Cloudflare (and Workers), Istio, AWS (EKS), Terraform, Datadog and custom-built Kubernetes controllers.

What You'll Do

• Design and manage high-availability of systems using Cloudflare, Istio, and Kubernetes to ensure low-latency connectivity for global users.
• Architect "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) solutions to automate the provisioning and scaling of edge locations, service meshes, and ingress controllers.
• Scale the platform for hyper-growth, ensuring that as the number of services and users doubles, the operational overhead remains manageable.
• Own API Reliability and Traffic Management, implementing sophisticated rate-limiting, circuit breaking, and traffic-shaping policies to protect the fleet.
• Develop custom controllers and operators within Kubernetes to automate complex infrastructure patterns and improve system resilience.
• Improve system observability by building robust monitoring, tracing, and alerting pipelines that provide a "glass-box" view of every request.
• Evolve deployment strategies, supporting the transition from monolithic architectures to microservices through canary releases, blue-green deployments, and intelligent traffic splitting.
• Act as a technical consultant for product teams, helping them design their services for maximum reliability and scalability.
• Establish best practices for the team by conducting rigorous code reviews, writing detailed post-mortems, and mentoring junior engineers.
• Solve hard scaling challenges at the intersection of the network and the application, using industry-standard tools and homegrown solutions.
• Build relationships with developers across all of our teams to understand
  
  

• Strong technical depth - 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on platform, infrastructure, or high-scale distributed systems.
• A track record of building clean abstractions and extensible architecture that scales with the business.
• Experience operating and scaling systems in high-growth, high-complexity environments.
• Thrives in fast-paced settings where priorities shift and unconventional problem-solving is required.
• Comfort with ambiguity - you identify high-leverage problems and take ownership without waiting for perfect clarity.
• Strong technical leadership and influence across org boundaries, driving sound, scalable technology choices.
• Clear, concise communication - you can distill complex ideas into actionable insights for engineers, PMs, and stakeholders alike.
• Deep understanding of the modern infrastructure stack (Kubernetes and AWS are a significant bonus).