Senior Engineering Manager - Payments Experience

About the role

Rippling is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager (M8) to lead the transformation of Payments Experience, owning the layer that powers how employers, employees, and contractors move money. You will define a new standard for how people interact with money at Rippling by building experiences that are performant, intuitive, and AI-first. This team sits at the center of one of Rippling’s most critical workflows, bridging payroll logic and the underlying payment processing systems to ensure money moves accurately, reliably, and at scale.

Your mandate will go beyond building experiences for individual products: you will platformize payments into reusable capabilities that can power any fintech product at Rippling, creating common primitives, workflows, and abstractions that allow teams to build and launch new financial products faster. This is a highly cross-functional role partnering closely with Money Movement, Tax, Contractor, and Global Payroll teams. You will own the full-stack experience for employers and their employees and contractors, while driving innovation in new product areas like contractor wallets and modern payout methods.

This is a unique opportunity to be the first leader fully owning Payments Experience at Rippling, shaping the strategy, architecture, organization, and product direction for a critical and rapidly growing domain.

Responsibilities

• Own the Payments experience: Lead the systems and product layer that define how money moves through execution readiness, status, recovery, and user-facing resolution.
• Build AI-first experiences: Use AI to make payments more proactive and understandable—surfacing anomalies, explaining payment outcomes, anticipating issues, answering questions, and helping users resolve problems without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
• Platformize and unify payments experience across Rippling: Build reusable payment capabilities, APIs, workflows, and abstractions that can be leveraged across Rippling’s fintech products, enabling teams to launch new financial products faster while gradually bringing existing, product-specific payment experiences onto a common platform.
• Shape long-term strategy: Define the roadmap for Payments Experience and the broader payments platform, with the opportunity to expand ownership into additional product-layer payment experiences across Rippling.
• Define the product/platform boundary: Establish the architecture and operating model that separates shared payment capabilities from product-specific logic, enabling teams across Rippling to build new financial products quickly and consistently.
• Build a world-class payments experience: Create fast, intuitive, and easy-to-understand experiences that abstract away payment complexity while maintaining high standards for latency, reliability, resilience, and global-scale performance.
• Build the future of contractor payments: Own the “Balance” (wallet) product, enabling contractors to receive and manage earnings across multiple clients with modern withdrawal methods like crypto, instant transfer payment methods, and more in the future.
• Operate at global scale: Work with globally distributed engineering and non-engineering teams and ensure reliability across high-volume payment systems, with a strong focus on operational excellence, observability, fault tolerance, and recovery.

Requirements

• AI product mindset: Curiosity and experience applying AI to improve product experiences, automate workflows, surface insights, or make complex systems easier for users to understand and navigate.
• Proven engineering leadership: Experience leading organizations of 10+ engineers, including senior and staff-level engineers, in high-scale distributed systems environments.
• Platform-building mindset: Experience building shared platforms, APIs, or foundational capabilities that enable multiple product teams to move faster and avoid duplicated infrastructure.
• Strong product sense: Ability to balance technical excellence with user experience and business outcomes, particularly in product-heavy engineering organizations.
• Architectural leadership: Demonstrated ability to define and evolve the architecture of complex, highly available systems while making pragmatic tradeoffs between platform investment and near-term product velocity.
• Experience building great experiences: A track record of turning complex workflows into simple, intuitive, and performant product experiences.
• Operational rigor: High bar for reliability, correctness, observability, and system resilience—especially in critical financial or transactional systems.
• Experience with mission-critical systems: Background in payments, fintech, payroll, banking, or similarly complex domains is preferred but not required.
• Cross-functional leadership: Track record of partnering effectively with Product, Design, and other engineering teams to define and deliver end-to-end systems.
• Global collaboration: Comfortable leading distributed teams and navigating complex workflows across time zones and geographies.
• Strong communication and ownership: Ability to operate with autonomy, create clarity in ambiguous spaces, influence senior stakeholders, and set direction for a large technical domain.

Pay

The pay range for this role is $207,000 - $345,000 USD per year (US San Francisco Bay Area). A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation—including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location.

Schedule

For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office at least three days a week to be an essential function of the employee's role.