Senior Engineering Manager, Platform
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.
About the role
Rippling brings together the systems businesses use to manage their people, payroll, and operations. Behind that experience is a platform that allows teams to model complex data, connect it across products, and build applications that adapt to how each business works. We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to help shape that foundation. You’ll lead engineers working on capabilities that many teams depend on, from shared data and query systems to the tools used to build and customize applications. This is a role for someone who enjoys turning hard technical problems into simple, reliable building blocks—and helping a strong team do the best work of their careers.
Responsibilities
- Lead and grow a team responsible for Rippling's core cloud infrastructure and production platform
- Define the long-term strategy for infrastructure scalability, reliability, and operational excellence
- Own Kubernetes platform architecture, cluster management, and production infrastructure lifecycle
- Drive infrastructure automation through Infrastructure as Code and platform self-service capabilities
- Establish best practices around observability, monitoring, incident response, and disaster recovery
- Partner with engineering teams to improve system reliability, deployment safety, and operational efficiency
- Lead large-scale infrastructure initiatives spanning multiple engineering organizations
- Develop and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong culture of ownership and technical excellence
- Drive improvements in cost efficiency, capacity planning, and cloud resource management
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant work on platform, data, backend, or distributed systems.
- 4+ years of engineering management experience leading teams that build and operate production systems.
- Strong technical depth in system design, data modeling, APIs, and scalable service architecture.
- Experience building shared platforms or infrastructure adopted by multiple products or engineering teams.
- The ability to engage deeply in technical design, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide engineers through difficult implementation decisions.
- Experience leading systems through growth, including changes to performance, reliability, and data architecture.
- A track record of developing senior engineers and helping them grow into broader technical leadership.
- Strong cross-functional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to bring clarity to ambiguous, high-impact problems.
Pay
The pay range for this role is: 207,000 - 345,000 USD per year (US San Francisco Bay Area).
Schedule
Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. 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 under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.