Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Financial AI Product

About the role

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance, unifying systems like payroll, expenses, benefits, and device management into a single platform that can onboard a new employee anywhere in the world in 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, the company has raised over $1.4B from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock.

The Financial AI Product team builds the systems that power critical financial workflows — payroll, payments, reconciliation, compliance, and operational finance. These products sit at the intersection of money movement, employee trust, customer operations, and regulatory complexity, requiring accuracy, reliability, auditability, and resilience. The team is applying AI to make these workflows dramatically simpler: interpreting inconsistent data, automating manual review, surfacing exceptions, explaining outcomes, and accelerating implementation while preserving the deterministic controls financial products demand. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will help define how AI becomes a core part of financial product and infrastructure at Rippling.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-powered product capabilities for complex financial workflows such as onboarding, data ingestion, reconciliation, validation, exception handling, and operational review.
• Design systems that combine model-driven reasoning with deterministic financial execution.
• Build workflows that trace financial values back to source evidence, surface unresolved gaps, and prevent downstream execution when validation fails.
• Create ingestion and normalization systems that can handle messy exports, historical records, customer-provided files, and inconsistent provider formats.
• Develop evals, testing harnesses, observability, and feedback loops to measure AI quality in workflows where “almost always right” is not good enough.
• Partner closely with product, design, operations, compliance, and platform teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities and turn them into reliable product capabilities.
• Work through ambiguous product areas, prototype quickly, and scale successful solutions into reusable product and platform primitives.
• Help set the engineering bar for correctness, auditability, security, reliability, and production safety in AI-enabled and new AI-native financial products.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at meaningful scale.
• Experience designing backend systems, data models, APIs, workflows, or platform infrastructure for complex business domains.
• Strong judgment around reliability, correctness, edge cases, and operational risk.
• Interest in applied AI, LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction, or AI-assisted workflows.
• Ability to reason clearly about where AI should be used, where deterministic systems should take over, and how to build guardrails around model-driven workflows.
• Product sense and comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where the right answer is not obvious upfront.
• Ability to partner with product managers, domain experts, operations teams, and engineers to turn messy real-world workflows into simple, scalable software.
• A high-ownership mindset: you can take a problem from vague customer pain through architecture, implementation, rollout, measurement, and iteration.

Pay

The pay range for this role is $168,000 – $280,000 USD per year (US Tier 1). Final offer amounts may vary based on professional background, experience, and location. The role also includes equity and benefits.

Schedule

Rippling highly values in-office collaboration. For office-based employees (those living within a defined radius of a Rippling office), working in the office at least three days a week is considered an essential function of the role under current policy.