Staff Software Engineer - Workflows Platform

About Rippling

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 $1.4B+ 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 all 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. Hence, Rippling is building an employee data cloud to ingest and connect data from thousands of sources to power complex workflows, approvals, permissions, dashboards and reports.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Workflow Platform team. This team builds and maintains the foundational orchestration engine that powers critical workflows across Rippling's suite of products. From employee onboarding that spans HR, IT, and Finance processes to complex payroll operations that coordinate across multiple systems, our platform ensures reliable execution of business-critical operations.

What you will do

• Design and implement core components of our distributed workflow engine that orchestrates cross-product workflows such as:
• • Employee lifecycle management (onboarding, transfers, offboarding)
  • Payroll processing and compliance operations
  • Benefits enrollment and management
  • Device and app provisioning
  • Security and access management
• Build robust platform features including:
• • Workflow state management and persistence
  • Task scheduling and dispatching systems
  • Workflow versioning and compatibility layers
  • Distributed consistency and consensus mechanisms
  • Retry handling and error recovery systems
• Develop developer tooling that enables Rippling's product teams to:
• • Author complex workflows as code
  • Debug and monitor workflow executions
  • Handle versioning and deployment of workflow definitions
  • Integrate new products into existing workflows
• Drive architectural decisions that impact:
• • System scalability to support rapid customer growth
  • Fault tolerance for business-critical operations
  • Data consistency across multiple products
  • Developer productivity across Rippling's engineering teams

What you will need

• 8+ years of experience in backend software development, with significant exposure to distributed systems
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts:
• • Consensus algorithms (e.g., Raft, Paxos)
  • Eventual consistency and strong consistency models
  • Failure detection and recovery mechanisms
  • State machine replication
  • Event sourcing and CQRS patterns
• Experience with:
• • Building highly available, fault-tolerant systems
  • Database internals and persistence layers
  • Message queues and event streaming platforms
  • Microservice architectures
  • API design and