Staff Software Engineer - Financial Services

About the Company

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

Rippling processes multi-billions of dollars in annual transaction volume, serving as the financial engine for businesses worldwide. As a Staff Engineer on the Financial Services team, you will join a lean, high-impact group responsible for the architecture that moves this money. You will lead the 0-to-1 design and build of our cash prediction and money movement tracking systems, architecting the "source of truth" for financial flows from the ground up. This role offers the unique technical challenge of building greenfield, high-reliability financial systems at scale, serving as the technical anchor for Rippling’s expansion into global markets.

Responsibilities

• Greenfield Architecture: Design and build the "source of truth" system for tracking money movement, cash prediction, and treasury management. Build upstream systems that feed into our general ledger and bookkeeping.
• Global Expansion: Own the core payment and treasury functionality required to grow Rippling’s Payroll and Spend products in the UK and Australia. Your work will directly unblock new international revenue streams.
• Scale & Reliability: Architect distributed systems that can handle exponential transaction volume growth. Ensure reliability, idempotency, and fault tolerance—if this system fails, people don't get paid.
• Technical Leadership: Solve challenging and ambiguous problems through hands-on coding and high-level design. Define the longer-term technical roadmap, build the team, and mentor senior engineers.
• Cross-Functional Bridge: Collaborate deeply with Treasury, Operations, and Analytics teams to translate complex banking and liquidity requirements into scalable software solutions.

Requirements

• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record in backend development and distributed systems.
• Architecture: Proven ability to design large-scale, fault-tolerant systems from scratch. Understanding of trade-offs between consistency and availability, and when "eventual consistency" is insufficient.
• High Agency: Thrive in ambiguity—identify business problems, scope technical solutions, and execute without waiting for direction.
• Domain Agility: Intellectual curiosity to master complex domains like treasury and money movement quickly, even without prior background.
• Tech Stack: Deep proficiency in a modern backend language (Python, Go, Java, etc.) plus experience with complex data modeling (SQL/NoSQL) and data processing frameworks (Spark/Flink).

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. This role is office-based, requiring in-office work at least three days a week for employees within a defined radius of a Rippling office.

Pay

The pay range for this role is $189,000 - $330,750 USD per year (US Tier 1). A variety of factors are considered when determining compensation, including professional background, experience, and location.