Senior Staff Software Engineer, Query and Data 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’s Data Cloud underpins every analytical experience across our platform—from real-time dashboards for HR and IT admins to the next generation of AI-driven workflows. At the heart of this ecosystem is RQL (Rippling Query Language), our proprietary language that allows customers and internal developers to build complex formulas, analytics, and applications.

As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Query and Data Platform team, you will be a "dual-ended" technical leader. You will have the technical depth to drop into the code to unblock high-priority tactical initiatives, while simultaneously surfacing to architect the multiyear roadmap for our data infrastructure. You aren’t just building a feature; you are evolving a startup-stage infrastructure into a world-class, mature data platform that rivals the industry’s leading cloud providers.

What you will do

• Architect the Future of RQL: Own the grammar, parser, and compiler layer of RQL. You will expand its expressive power to ensure that Rippling’s AI can leverage structured queries to provide authoritative, provable answers without hallucinations.
• Drive Platform Maturation: Lead the strategic shift from "tactical execution" to "platform excellence," designing systems for long-term reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Optimize at Scale: Take accountability for performance and cost-efficiency across a massive technical stack involving Trino, Iceberg, and S3. You will have the autonomy to launch cross-functional projects that impact the company’s bottom line.
• Bridge AI and Data: Collaborate with AI initiative leads to ensure the Data Cloud provides the necessary "backend of the backend" infrastructure to support complex, high-velocity data transformations.
• High-Leverage Leadership: Act as a force multiplier for a senior-heavy team of Staff and Senior Staff engineers. You will transmute ambiguous business needs into concrete technical architectures that multiple teams can execute against.
• Engineering Excellence: Set the standard for state-of-the-art development at Rippling, working with technologies like Python, MongoDB, CDC, Kafka, and Flink to build ingestion systems that operate at a global scale.

What you will need

• 12+ years of experience in backend or data platform engineering, with a proven track record of operating at the Principal or Senior Staff (L9+) level.
• Deep Systems Expertise: You have extensive experience with database internals, query optimization, or building custom compilers/programming languages.
• Big Data Mastery: Proficient in the "modern data lakehouse" stack—specifically Trino/Presto, Apache Iceberg, and S3.
• Scale & Maturity: You have seen what "good" looks like at a massive scale and know how to navigate a system through the growing pains of rapid organizational scaling.
• Dual-Ended Impact: