Director of Engineering - Infrastructure

Overview

Ripping 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.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our Data Infrastructure organization. This leader will define the strategy, roadmap, and execution model for the platforms that underpin Rippling's next generation of products, workflows, and AI-powered experiences. You will lead multiple teams responsible for databases, orchestration platforms, and AI infrastructure while partnering closely with engineering, product, and executive leadership to ensure our platform can support the company's ambitious growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale the Data Infrastructure organization, including engineering managers and senior technical leaders across multiple teams.
• Define and execute the long-term vision and roadmap for Rippling's data infrastructure platforms.
• Own the strategy, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of critical database infrastructure, including MongoDB and AWS DocumentDB.
• Drive the evolution of Rippling's orchestration platforms, including Temporal and related workflow infrastructure that powers critical business and product workflows.
• Lead the infrastructure strategy for shared AI platforms, developer tooling, and foundational services that enable AI-powered products and internal engineering capabilities.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data, AI, and Platform leaders to align infrastructure investments with company priorities and future business needs.
• Drive architecture decisions and technical direction for systems supporting large-scale transactional workloads and workflow execution across the company.
• Establish and maintain high standards for reliability, availability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
• Build and develop a world-class engineering organization through hiring, coaching, organizational design, and leadership development.
• Identify and execute high-impact initiatives that span multiple organizations and require alignment across technical and business stakeholders.
• Translate ambiguous technical and organizational challenges into clear strategies, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering managers and large infrastructure-focused organizations.
• Proven experience building and scaling data infrastructure, database platforms, distributed systems, or foundational platform services.
• Experience leading organizations responsible for mission-critical infrastructure with demanding reliability, performance, and scalability requirements.
• Strong understanding of database technologies, storage systems, distributed architectures, and infrastructure operations.
• Experience building or operating workflow orchestration platforms, data platforms, or large-scale backend infrastructure.
• Experience driving cross-functional technical strategy across multiple engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated success hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering leaders and senior engineers.
• Strong technical judgment with the ability to balance long-term architectural investments against near-term business priorities.

Qualifications

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence executive, product, and engineering stakeholders.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and create clarity where none exists.

Benefits

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

Pay

The pay range for this role is: 216,000 - 378,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)

Schedule

San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
New York, NY