Staff software engineer - fintech data platform

About Rippling

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.

Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About The Role

Rippling is rapidly expanding its global finance ecosystem across Payroll, Tax, Payments, Billing, and Expense Management. At the heart of this growth lies our Finance Data Platform — the foundation that ensures data consistency, integrity, and intelligence across all financial products.

As a Staff Software Engineer in the Finance Products organization, you will play a pivotal role in defining and scaling the data architecture that powers billions of dollars in global transactions and financial reporting. You’ll design the systems, models, and pipelines that ensure accuracy, compliance, and performance across a complex, interconnected finance landscape.

This role requires deep technical expertise in data systems, financial domain understanding, and the ability to align architecture across multiple teams and products.

You’ll help build the foundation for the world’s most comprehensive financial platform — one where every payroll, tax, expense, and invoice flows through a single intelligent data architecture. Your work will directly impact how millions of employees and businesses handle their money every day.

What You Will Do

• Define and drive the data architecture strategy for Finance Products, establishing the long-term blueprint for data modeling, data flow, and system integration across Payroll, Tax, Payments, Billing, and related domains.
• Design robust and extensible data models and schemas that serve as the single source of truth for financial transactions, compliance records, and customer accounts.
• Build and evolve the data infrastructure — including data ingestion, transformation, and storage layers — to support both operational workloads (e.g., payroll calculations, tax filings) and analytical use cases (e.g., reporting, forecasting, anomaly detection).
• Ensure data accuracy, compliance, and auditability, working closely with product, legal, and compliance teams to meet evolving regulatory and accounting standards globally.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to embed scalable data abstractions and APIs into the core Finance Products stack, enabling seamless cross-product interoperability.
• Lead cross-org data initiatives, including data lineage, observability, quality frameworks, and master data governance, ensuring trust and reliability in all financial data.
• Mentor and influence senior engineers and data leaders, raising the technical bar for data modeling, schema evolution, and distributed data systems across the organization.
  
  

What You Will Need

• 10+ years of experience in software or data engineering, with a strong emphasis on data architecture, modeling, and distributed data systems.
• Proven ability to design high-integrity financial data systems — including ledgering, reconciliation, and audit frameworks — that operate at global scale.
• Deep experience with relational and analytical data modeling, including event-driven and streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka, Debezium, CDC pipelines).
• Strong understanding of financial data domains such as payroll, tax, payments, or accounting is highly desirable.
• Expertise in SQL and modern data warehousing technologies (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) as well as data orchestration and transformation tools (e.g., Airflow, dbt).
• Ability to balance technical purity with product velocity, iteratively delivering architecture that supports immediate product needs while setting up long-term scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of influencing architecture across multiple teams and business functions.
  
  

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email [email protected]

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:

180,000 - 315,000 USD per year(US Tier 1)