Director of Engineering - Platform
Rippling, Seattle, WA, United States
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’s Platform organization owns the foundational systems that power the entire company. We support ~1,000 engineers building across dozens of product surfaces, providing the shared infrastructure, developer platforms, and core abstractions that enable teams to move fast without breaking things.
At the core of the platform is a dynamically stitched, permissioned ontology, a high-performance object store, an event-driven dependency system, and Rippling Query Language (RQL). Together, these power critical systems like workflows & automation, group management, application building, search & AI platform, and our object graph and data catalog.
This role is responsible for scaling these systems and the teams behind them—driving platform strategy, improving developer leverage across the company, and ensuring we continue to deliver reliable, high-impact infrastructure as Rippling grows.
What You'll Do
Lead and scale a high-performing engineering team responsible for core platform systems used across the company
Define and drive multi-quarter platform initiatives that improve developer velocity, system reliability, and product leverage
Partner closely with product and engineering leaders to evolve the platform as a product, balancing long-term architecture with near-term business needs
Take ambiguous, high-impact problem areas (e.g., system scalability, developer experience, platform abstractions) and turn them into clear execution plans
Drive alignment across multiple teams working on complex, interdependent systems including internal platforms, infrastructure, and developer tooling
Raise the bar on engineering quality, operational excellence, and execution across the platform organization
Qualifications
10+ years of experience building and shipping complex software systems, with a strong focus on distributed systems and platform infrastructure
6+ years of experience managing and growing high-performing engineering teams
Experience owning or contributing to large-scale internal platforms or developer infrastructure
Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from concept through execution
Strong product intuition with the ability to treat platform systems as products for internal users
Experience operating in fast-paced, high-growth environments with evolving priorities
Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent
The pay range for this role is: 216,000 - 378,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)
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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’s Platform organization owns the foundational systems that power the entire company. We support ~1,000 engineers building across dozens of product surfaces, providing the shared infrastructure, developer platforms, and core abstractions that enable teams to move fast without breaking things.
At the core of the platform is a dynamically stitched, permissioned ontology, a high-performance object store, an event-driven dependency system, and Rippling Query Language (RQL). Together, these power critical systems like workflows & automation, group management, application building, search & AI platform, and our object graph and data catalog.
This role is responsible for scaling these systems and the teams behind them—driving platform strategy, improving developer leverage across the company, and ensuring we continue to deliver reliable, high-impact infrastructure as Rippling grows.
What You'll Do
Lead and scale a high-performing engineering team responsible for core platform systems used across the company
Define and drive multi-quarter platform initiatives that improve developer velocity, system reliability, and product leverage
Partner closely with product and engineering leaders to evolve the platform as a product, balancing long-term architecture with near-term business needs
Take ambiguous, high-impact problem areas (e.g., system scalability, developer experience, platform abstractions) and turn them into clear execution plans
Drive alignment across multiple teams working on complex, interdependent systems including internal platforms, infrastructure, and developer tooling
Raise the bar on engineering quality, operational excellence, and execution across the platform organization
Qualifications
10+ years of experience building and shipping complex software systems, with a strong focus on distributed systems and platform infrastructure
6+ years of experience managing and growing high-performing engineering teams
Experience owning or contributing to large-scale internal platforms or developer infrastructure
Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from concept through execution
Strong product intuition with the ability to treat platform systems as products for internal users
Experience operating in fast-paced, high-growth environments with evolving priorities
Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent
The pay range for this role is: 216,000 - 378,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)
#J-18808-Ljbffr