Senior Engineering Manager, AI Onboarding & Growth

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. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from top investors and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

About the role

We are seeking a deeply technical Senior Engineering Manager to lead the AI Onboarding & Growth engineering team, a high-impact product platform team at the center of Rippling’s next phase of product growth. This team owns some of Rippling’s most important customer-facing experiences, including company onboarding, self-serve activation, product-led growth, and the surfaces that drive adoption of Rippling’s AI products.

You will lead the transformation of these experiences from fragmented, manual workflows into intelligent, highly automated product experiences that help customers get value from Rippling faster and unlock new growth opportunities for the business. A major focus will be reinventing company onboarding through AI, moving toward an AI-first experience where customers provide documents up front and intelligent agents handle the rest.

This team is also responsible for building the platform and product experiences that enable self-serve and product-led growth, including helping customers discover, evaluate, purchase, and adopt Rippling products without requiring a traditional sales-led motion.

What We Build

• AI-Powered Company Onboarding: Building the next generation of company onboarding around AI agents that ingest customer-provided documents, understand product-specific requirements, identify missing information, orchestrate workflows, and automate implementation tasks.
• Self-Serve & Product-Led Growth: Creating shared product infrastructure and customer experiences that allow companies to discover, evaluate, purchase, activate, and expand Rippling products with less dependency on sales and implementation teams.
• AI Adoption & Growth: Building product surfaces, experiences, and experimentation infrastructure to increase awareness, engagement, and adoption of Rippling AI across the product portfolio.
• Shared Product Experiences & Platform: Owning globally consistent customer-facing surfaces such as onboarding, navigation, home, company settings, and other shared experiences, as well as the platform abstractions that allow product teams to integrate with them.
• Cross-Product Product Infrastructure: Developing APIs, abstractions, data models, registries, workflow systems, and other platform primitives that allow dozens of Rippling products to work together through a coherent experience.

You will lead a highly capable, senior-heavy engineering team operating at the intersection of product, platform, AI, and growth. The work requires both deep technical judgment and strong product instincts, with high leverage across the broader engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead and Mentor: Build and lead a high-performing team of senior engineers working across AI, onboarding, growth, and product platform infrastructure. Develop technical leaders who can independently own ambiguous, cross-functional problems.
• Own AI-First Onboarding: Set the technical direction for transforming company onboarding into an AI-native experience. Define architecture, abstractions, APIs, agent interfaces, and platform primitives for AI systems.
• Drive Product-Led Growth: Partner with Product and Design to build self-serve and PLG experiences that increase activation, conversion, expansion, and time-to-value.
• Drive AI Adoption Across Rippling: Build shared experiences and growth mechanisms to make Rippling AI discoverable, useful, and deeply integrated into workflows.
• Build Scalable Product Platforms: Identify common patterns across Rippling’s product teams and turn them into durable platform abstractions.
• Own High-Traffic Customer Experiences: Set technical and product direction for critical customer-facing surfaces, balancing usability, performance, reliability, and experimentation velocity.
• Stay Deeply Technical: Participate directly in architecture and system design, particularly across distributed systems, workflow orchestration, APIs, data models, agentic systems, and observability.
• Partner Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Product, Design, Data, AI, Growth, and engineering leaders to build alignment across teams with different priorities.
• Shape Technical Strategy: Help define long-term architecture and product strategy for the team’s expanding charter, establishing durable technical principles.

Requirements

• Exceptional Engineering Leadership: Proven experience leading strong engineering teams in fast-moving environments, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.
• Deep Technical Foundation: Strong technical depth in backend systems, distributed architecture, APIs, workflow systems, platform infrastructure, and production engineering.
• AI-Native Product & Engineering Mindset: Strong understanding of modern AI application patterns and experience using AI to rethink product workflows. Experience with agents, LLM-powered applications, or intelligent automation is highly valuable.
• Strong Product Sense: Ability to reason from customer problems and business outcomes, not just technical requirements.
• Platform Thinking: Experience building or leading product platforms that serve multiple teams, with strong judgment around abstractions, reuse, and extensibility.
• Exceptional Ambiguity Tolerance: Ability to create clarity and strategy in rapidly evolving environments.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders across engineering, product, design, and business functions.
• Data-Driven Problem Solving: Strong reliance on experimentation, product analytics, observability, and operational metrics.
• Strong Executive Communication: Ability to translate complex technical and product decisions into crisp narratives for leadership and cross-functional partners.
• Growth Orientation: Experience operating in environments where activation, conversion, adoption, or expansion metrics drive engineering and product strategy is a plus.

Benefits

Rippling is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. This role is office-based, with an expectation of at least three days per week in-office for employees within a defined radius of a Rippling office.

Pay

The pay range for this role in the US San Francisco Bay Area is $207,000 - $345,000 USD per year. A variety of factors are considered when determining compensation, including professional background, experience, and location.