Senior Engineering Manager, AI 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 AI is becoming a foundational platform across the company, powering everything from intelligent agents and automations to dashboards, and next-generation product experiences. As we rapidly scale adoption, we're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a critical AI Platform Infrastructure team responsible for the core systems that make AI products reliable, performant, and scalable.

This team sits at the intersection of platform engineering, AI infrastructure, developer experience, and product innovation. You'll lead a small, high-impact team building the underlying infrastructure that powers AI across Rippling—from retrieval systems and reasoning loops to observability, memory, tooling, and execution environments.

This is not a traditional ML Infrastructure role. While familiarity with machine learning systems is valuable, the focus is on building production-grade AI platforms and developer infrastructure that enable hundreds of engineers and AI-powered products across Rippling.

You'll partner closely with engineering leaders, product leadership, and AI researchers to define the future of AI at Rippling while helping scale one of the company's fastest-growing product areas.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for the foundational AI platform powering Rippling AI.
• Own critical infrastructure areas including retrieval systems, search, reasoning frameworks, AI execution environments, observability, performance, and reliability.
• Drive improvements in latency, quality, scalability, and developer productivity across the AI platform.
• Build and evolve the platform capabilities that enable teams across Rippling to develop AI-powered products, agents, and automations.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to define platform strategy and prioritize investments that unlock the next generation of AI experiences.
• Lead large-scale initiatives across areas such as memory systems, automated tuning, evaluation frameworks, reporting, and AI performance optimization.
• Develop safe, scalable execution environments for AI-powered workflows, including code execution, document generation, and other agent capabilities.
• Collaborate with teams building customer-facing AI products while ensuring the underlying platform can support rapid growth and evolving use cases.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop exceptional engineers while fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and velocity
• Help shape the long-term architecture of Rippling's AI ecosystem as the company scales toward hundreds of AI-powered workflows and experiences.

What you will need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience leading teams delivering complex technical projects.
• Track record of leading engineers through highly ambiguous, fast-moving technical environments.
• Strong systems design and architecture experience across scalable backend platforms, infrastructure, or developer platforms.
• Experience building and operating production services with demanding requirements around reliability, performan