Staff Software Engineer - Dependency Tracking

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 $1.4+B 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’s "superpower" is the Ripple Effect—the ability for a single change (like a promotion) to trigger thousands of downstream updates across IT, HR, and Finance. The Dependency Tracking Team is the engine under the hood of this superpower.

We are spinning this out into its own dedicated function to handle massive scale. We currently process over 1 billion events per day and 10,000+ refreshes per second. Your mission is to build the distributed system that determines exactly what needs to be recomputed when the "object graph" changes, ensuring Rippling remains performant as our data volume grows by orders of magnitude.

What You Will Do

• Lead the Technical Roadmap: Drive the architecture for our dependency tracking system, moving it from its current state to a world-class, micro-batch/stream processing powerhouse.
• Solve for Scale: Tackle the problem of over-refreshing by designing algorithms to keep our execution QPS flat even as the underlying event stream explodes.
• Own the Stack: Work deeply with Flink, Java, and Python to manage a complex distributed system that powers every Rippling product.
• Operate as a Tech Lead: This is a "pure engineering" team. You will partner directly with other Platform Tech Leads and EMs (your primary customers) to define how Rippling’s core infrastructure evolves.
• Influence Strategy: Evaluate and implement new compute frameworks (e.g., Temporal) to replace or augment existing internal systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on core infrastructure or platform teams.
• Deep Distributed Systems Expertise: You have built and scaled systems that handle high QPS (10k+) and high data throughput.
• Stream Processing Pro: Hands-on experience with Apache Flink (or similar frameworks like Spark Streaming/Kafka Streams).
• Low-Level Enthusiast: You prefer building robust internal systems over user-facing product features.
• Language Agnostic: Proficiency in Python and Java (or a strong desire to master them).
• Algorithmic Depth: Experience with graph theory or complex dependency mapping is a major plus.

Additional Information

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 accomodations@rippling.com

Rippling highly values in-office collaboration. Employees living within 30 miles of an offic