About the role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Time and Attendance team, part of the Workforce management department. You'll build innovative solutions that enable employees to track the time they spent working and make sure they are paid accordingly!. The products we create have a massive impact on how our customers operate at a global scale. Workforce management products surfaces have the highest QPS of any endpoints at Rippling, and we're leading the company in terms of scaling our infrastructure and product experiences. Time and attendance ensure employees can report, review and submit their entries every day, at any time.

You'll be a technical leader in the team, building and owning highly available, reliable, and scalable systems and responsible for the entire lifecycle of critical software. Your role encompasses architectural design, hands-on development, operational excellence, and technical mentorship for Sr and earlier career engineers on a fast-moving team with tremendous impact.

This is a chance to shape the future of a rapidly growing product suite, bringing new AI solutions in-product, solve complex challenges, and help businesses manage their most valuable asset: their people.

What you will do

• Write Exceptional Code: Build scalable, maintainable, and high-performance backend systems that power critical workforce management products.
• Move Fast, But with Precision: Deliver high-quality features quickly by balancing speed and safety in your code.
• Drive Architecture & Design: Own architectural decisions and guide the full product lifecycle, from ideation to production. Utilize systems thinking to design and ship fault tolerant highly available, scalable and extendable systems.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with product managers, designers, and other teams to gather customer feedback and refine the product roadmap.
• Mentor & Lead: Support the growth of senior and junior engineers by sharing your expertise and promoting engineering best practices across the team.
• Shape the Future: As an early member of this team, you'll have a direct influence on team culture, structure, and processes.

What you will need

• Experience: 8+ years of backend development experience with expertise in Python, Django, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. Experience building systems with clean abstractions and event-driven architecture.
• Frontend Knowledge: Experience with React or JavaScript is a plus.
• Technical Expertise: Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals, algorithms, and system design-including async patterns, caching strategies, and database sharding. Comfortable developing scalable and extendable core services used across multiple products.
• Product Focused: You're not just a coder-you care deeply about the end user, product design, and delivering an intuitive, polished experience.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit: You thrive in a fast-paced, unstructured environment. You proactively identify problems, effectively scope and review others' work, provide strong coaching, and lead internal innovation such as building AI tools.

Additional Information

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:

189,000 - 315,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)