About the role

Rippling's employee graph is the backbone of every product. The Employee Lifecycle team owns the moments when that graph changes-role transitions, profile updates, and terminations-as well as the core surfaces where admins and employees interact with that data.

As a Product Lead, you will own the systems that define and update employee data across its lifecycle. This includes building and scaling workflows that handle key employee changes such as role transitions and offboarding, while ensuring these changes are accurate, reliable, and reflected consistently across systems. You'll also own the primary surfaces where this data is viewed and managed, shaping a simple, unified experience that makes employee information easy to understand, safe to update, and auditable over time.

This role requires thinking across a wide range of company sizes and use cases, from small teams to large, complex organizations. You will design workflows that support both individual actions and high-volume operations, ensuring performance and reliability at scale. A core part of the role is maintaining data integrity-making sure changes are traceable, compliant, and handled with precision-while holding a high bar for correctness and system reliability.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end roadmap for core employee lifecycle (Terminations, Transitions & Employee Apps and HRIS Platform) systems and surfaces, setting direction, prioritizing high-impact work, and making clear sequencing decisions that balance speed, scale, and correctness
• Lead the development of critical workflows that power employee changes across their lifecycle, ensuring these flows are intuitive for users while handling the underlying complexity required for accuracy across systems
• Drive enterprise readiness for high-stakes features by coordinating across partner teams and ensuring seamless interoperability with downstream systems and workflows
• Set and uphold a high bar for reliability and correctness, treating issues as product failures, driving root cause resolution, and continuously improving system robustness and user trust
• Define and own success metrics across the product surface, including workflow completion, system performance, reliability, and downstream impact, and use these to inform product strategy and execution
• Represent your product areas in cross-functional planning and leadership discussions, committing to clear outcomes, proactively identifying risks, and making trade-offs when priorities or constraints shift
• Operate as the central point of accountability across a distributed engineering team, building strong execution partnerships, driving alignment, and ensuring consistent delivery across time zones
• Communicate clearly with senior stakeholders, translating complex trade-offs into crisp decisions and ensuring visibility into progress, risks, and impact

What you will need

• 8+ years of product management experience, including significant ownership of platform or infrastructure products in a high-scale B2B environment
• A track record of delivering complex, high-impact products tied to enterprise outcomes, with experience driving execution across multiple teams under tight timelines
• Strong technical judgment across system design, including data modeling, APIs, and distributed systems; able to engage deeply with engineering and influence architectural decisions
• Experience owning reliability and performance for critical user-facing systems, with a high bar for correctness and a mindset of continuous improvement
• Strong product instincts in high-stakes environments, with the ability to make thoughtful trade-offs, sequence work effectively, and manage risk in complex systems
• Clear and direct communication style, with the ability to align engineering, design, and leadership through crisp thinking and structured decision-making
• Experience in HR, payroll, or other systems of record is a plus, particularly in areas involving data integrity, compliance, and auditability

Additional Information

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.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone's compensation-including a candidate's professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.

The pay range for this role is:

174,000 - 290,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)