Sr. Product Design Manager, Platform

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  addresses.

At Rippling, Design is at the core of our mission to free smart people to tackle hard problems. We help teams automate the mundane, surface insights instantly, and operate with clarity and confidence. In a world of outdated, bloated legacy products, we’re building something modern, streamlined, and deeply considered. A thoughtful user experience is how we turn complexity into simplicity so our customers can stay focused on what matters.

As a Senior Manager on Platform, you’ll lead a team of designers focused on Rippling’s core experience which may include portions of our shared surfaces like our navigation and home in addition to our data offerings and how customers gain insight into their business. You’ll also be hands‑on shaping system‑wide AI experiences and platform primitives that other product teams build on.

This role offers a unique opportunity to lead a business‑critical team, design innovative foundational experiences from the ground up, and reimagine key workflows at platform scale for massive customer impact.

The Platform is differentiated in Rippling—it drives the portfolio’s overall success and each feature improvement or new product has outsized impact on Rippling’s growth and, more importantly, our customers’ success. If you’re a seasoned leader who thrives in high‑velocity environments, handles complexity with confidence, and picks up new domains quickly—we’d love to hear from you.

• Lead a business‑critical platform team driving foundational improvements across Rippling’s core experience—design systems, shared surfaces, and system‑wide AI experiences—fueling company growth and differentiation.
• Guide a team of designers shaping platform primitives and cross‑product experiences, including component libraries, tokens, theming, navigation, search, approvals, notifications, and accessibility.
• Design large‑scale, complex experiences that are learnable, powerful, trustworthy, and efficient for users across the globe.
• Create a culture of craft, quality, and execution by inspiring, motivating, and leading product designers across experience levels to do the best work of their careers.
• Define and steward quality bars and decision frameworks (principles, reviews, quality gates) that drive high‑quality decisions across the organization.
• Establish contribution and governance models for the design system with Engineering to ensure adoption, performance, and accessibility at scale.
• Prototype and ship system‑wide AI experiences (assistive workflows, smart defaults, summarization) in partnership with AI/ML and core product teams.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, and executive leadership to deliver best‑in‑class, innovative work that pushes the limits of what’s possible.

• 8+ years of professional design experience, with 3+ years leading and managing design teams.
• Must be familiar with complexity: demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and interdependent systems, turning complexity into simple, learnable patterns.
• Proven ability to drive high‑quality decisions through organizations, establishing mechanisms (principles, reviews, quality bars) that align cross‑functional stakeholders.
• Exemplary craft with specific, concrete portfolio examples…