Principal Software Engineer

About Rippling Payroll

Rippling Payroll is redefining how companies pay their people across the world — turning payroll from a cost center into a strategic advantage. Built on Rippling Unity — our unified workforce platform — Payroll connects HR, IT, and Finance so every policy, approval, and pay calculation automatically stays in sync across systems and countries.

With $750M+ ARR, >23,000 customers, and >$70B in annualized payroll volume, we’re building the most intelligent, automated, and compliant payroll infrastructure on the planet.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P10) to help architect and scale Rippling’s next-generation Global Payroll Platform — a system that powers payments, compliance, and computation for millions of employees across 50+ countries.

This role sits at the intersection of AI-powered automation, compliance-as-code, and massive scale — with direct ownership over core systems that define how Rippling processes global payroll, taxes, and payments at sub-second latency and near-zero error tolerance.

What You’ll Own

• Architect Rippling’s next-gen Payroll computation engine — modular, extensible, and capable of encoding multi-jurisdictional compliance logic declaratively.
• Design data models and pipelines that handle versioned pay runs, audit trails, retroactive corrections, and time-based computations at global scale.
• Build scalable rules engines to automate ever-changing tax, benefits, and labor laws across jurisdictions, ensuring compliance through dynamic, AI-generated logic.
• Modernize global payment infrastructure for real-time or near-instant disbursements while balancing reconciliation, fraud detection, and regulatory constraints.
• Evolve reporting and permissions systems to deliver real-time insights and granular access controls for complex, multi-entity organizations.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, and Finance teams to convert ambiguous regulatory specs into clear, deterministic system behavior.
• Lead high-impact initiatives like sandboxed “simulation” payrolls, AI-powered paystub explainability, and what-if analysis for enterprises.
• Shape the long-term platform vision, influencing 150+ engineers across Finance and HR Infrastructure as a multiplier, mentor, and architectural authority.

What Success Looks Like

• System Reliability: Sub-second computation accuracy for global pay runs, with zero critical compliance defects.
• Extensibility: New countries, pay types, and tax rules added with minimal engineering overhead.
• Performance: Orders of magnitude improvement in latency and cost efficiency across distributed computation.
• Developer Velocity: Simplified APIs, testing frameworks, and onboarding for internal and partner developers.
• Business Impact: Reduction in country onboarding time, payroll failure rates, and manual compliance interventions.

What We’re Looking For

• 18+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems in high-compliance or high-integrity domains (Finance, Payroll, Tax, Insurance, etc.).
• Deep expertise in data architecture, domain-driven design, and rule-based / event-driven systems.
• Experience scaling compliance-heavy, multi-country systems — ideally payroll, tax, or financial computation platforms.
• Proficiency in designing modular service boundaries, ensuring backward compatibility and auditability.
• Strong understanding of computation correctness, versioned state, precision handling, and retroactive adjustments.
• Proven ability to partner across functions — translating legal/compliance constraints into elegant, maintainable systems.
• A strong architectural voice who can both design systems and mentor teams to scale them sustainably.

Bonus Points

• Experience with AI-driven system automation or compliance-as-code frameworks.
• Hands-on work with global payroll systems, real-time payments, or statutory tax logic.
• Familiarity with event sourcing, CQRS, streaming pipelines, and immutable data stores.
• Contributions to open-source distributed computation frameworks or rule engines.

Why Rippling

• Backed by world-class investors (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil, Goldman Sachs)
• Valued among the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history
• Build at the heart of Rippling’s Finance platform, where Payroll, Spend, Bill Pay, and Banking converge into a unified ecosystem.
• Join a team that pushes the limits of possible, builds winning systems, and moves fast with conviction.