About The Role

Rippling Infrastructure operates as a scaled engineering organization responsible for the mission-critical systems that power every product and platform across the company. We support nearly 1,000 engineers globally and deliver the foundational infrastructure that enables Rippling's products to scale reliably and efficiently.

As part of the broader Platform organization, the Data Infrastructure team owns the core platforms that power data persistence, workflow orchestration, and AI enablement across Rippling. Our organization is responsible for database infrastructure, orchestration systems, and foundational AI platforms that support both customer-facing products and internal engineering teams.

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our Data Infrastructure organization. This leader will define the strategy, roadmap, and execution model for the platforms that underpin Rippling's next generation of products, workflows, and AI-powered experiences. You will lead multiple teams responsible for databases, orchestration platforms, and AI infrastructure while partnering closely with engineering, product, and executive leadership to ensure our platform can support the company's ambitious growth.

The ideal candidate combines deep infrastructure expertise with exceptional organizational leadership. They have experience building and scaling large-scale distributed systems, developing strong engineering leaders, and driving complex technical initiatives across rapidly growing organizations.

What You'll Do

• Lead and scale the Data Infrastructure organization, including engineering managers and senior technical leaders across multiple teams.
• Define and execute the long-term vision and roadmap for Rippling's data infrastructure platforms.
• Own the strategy, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of critical database infrastructure, including MongoDB and AWS DocumentDB.
• Drive the evolution of Rippling's orchestration platforms, including Temporal and related workflow infrastructure that powers critical business and product workflows.
• Lead the infrastructure strategy for shared AI platforms, developer tooling, and foundational services that enable AI-powered products and internal engineering capabilities.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data, AI, and Platform leaders to align infrastructure investments with company priorities and future business needs.
• Drive architecture decisions and technical direction for systems supporting large-scale transactional workloads and workflow execution across the company.
• Establish and maintain high standards for reliability, availability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
• Build and develop a world-class engineering organization through hiring, coaching, organizational design, and leadership development.
• Identify and execute high-impact initiatives that span multiple organizations and require alignment across technical and business stakeholders.
• Translate ambiguous technical and organizational challenges into clear strategies, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering managers and large infrastructure-focused organizations.
• Proven experience building and scaling data infrastructure, database platforms, distributed systems, or foundational platform services.
• Experience leading organizations responsible for mission-critical infrastructure with demanding reliability, performance, and scalability requirements.
• Strong understanding of database technologies, storage systems, distributed architectures, and infrastructure operations.
• Experience building or operating workflow orchestration platforms, data platforms, or large-scale backend infrastructure.
• Experience driving cross-functional technical strategy across multiple engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated success hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering leaders and senior engineers.
• Strong technical judgment with the ability to balance long-term architectural investments against near-term business priorities.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence executive, product, and engineering stakeholders.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and create clarity where none exists.

Additional Information:

The pay range for this role is:

216,000 - 378,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)