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 critical 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.

A major focus of this role will be reinventing company onboarding through AI. Today, onboarding requires customers to work through product-specific implementation steps and provide information across complex workflows. We are building toward an AI-first experience where customers can provide documents and other artifacts up front, and intelligent agents can understand requirements, identify missing information, execute work across products, and continuously move customers toward activation with far less manual effort.

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. This includes driving adoption of Rippling AI across the product and creating shared infrastructure and experiences that allow new Rippling products to scale efficiently.

What We Build

• AI-Powered Company Onboarding: Building the next generation of company onboarding around AI agents that can ingest customer-provided documents and artifacts, understand product-specific requirements, identify missing information, orchestrate workflows across Rippling products, 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 that increase awareness, engagement, and adoption of Rippling AI across the broader Rippling 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 the 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 the architecture, abstractions, APIs, agent interfaces, and platform primitives required for AI systems to understand customer-provided information and automate implementation.
• Drive Product-Led Growth: Partner closely 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 that make Rippling AI discoverable, useful, and deeply integrated into customers’ 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 the technical and product direction for critical customer-facing surfaces, balancing usability, performance, reliability, and architectural quality.
• Stay Deeply Technical: Participate directly in architecture and system design, particularly across distributed systems, workflow orchestration, APIs, data models, agentic systems, observability, and platform abstractions.
• 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 the long-term architecture and product strategy for a newly expanding team charter.

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 a demonstrated ability to use AI to fundamentally rethink product workflows.
• 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 carve out strategy in a rapidly evolving charter.
• 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 are key inputs to engineering and product strategy.

Benefits

Rippling is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. Rippling highly values in-office collaboration and requires office-based employees to work in the office at least three days a week.

Pay

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