Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering San Francisco, CA

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.

Rippling’s Platform organization operates as a scaled engineering group that owns and runs a wide range of mission‑critical systems. Our teams support nearly 1,000 engineers building products and internal platforms across the company, and we provide the core shared services that power Rippling’s product ecosystem. These include a dynamically stitched, permission‑aware ontology, a highly scalable object platform store, an event‑driven dependency engine, and Rippling Query Language (RQL).

Platform teams span automation (workflows and approvals), group management, data pipelines, reliable events delivery, object platform, application building, search and AI platform, object graph (ontology) and data catalog, and more.

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who can strengthen and scale parts of this system by driving engineering excellence, operational rigor, and reliable delivery. In this role, you will lead and develop high‑performing teams, ensure strong execution, and partner closely with product and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into clear technical plans. You’ll help shape platform capabilities, deliver incremental value, and ensure our internal customers can build on top of a robust, scalable foundation.

The ideal candidate brings strong technical depth, a customer‑first mindset, and a track record of leading teams to deliver high‑impact, high‑quality distributed systems.

• Lead a team of passionate software engineers that pride themselves on ownership and impact
• Setup vision and technical strategy to drive impactful business outcomes
• Ensure the successful adoption of the platform by the engineering teams building our next generation of products and cloud offerings
• Set up and maintain engineering processes that empower the team to move quickly
• Develop a culture of engineering excellence and operational efficiency
• Grow, educate, and retain a successful team with a high delivery cadence in an agile environment
• Ensure your team ships products consistently at high quality and velocity
• Be hands‑on in technical architecture and reviews, provide technical leadership to the engineers, and be accountable for the technical decisions made on the team
• Partner closely with engineers, product, design, and cross‑functional leaders to help shape, sequence, and lead the team’s engineering work
• Have a holistic view across engineering & product and drive strategy
• Wear a product manager hat when needed

• A minimum 8 years of experience in engineering, delivering impactful products
• A minimum 4 years of experience building and managing high‑performing engineering teams
• Hands‑on experience with building distributed systems, APIs, and working knowledge of AWS & cloud‑based SaaS applications
• Effectiveness at leading and executing large & complex technical initiatives
• Experience in taking an idea and turning them into impactful products
• Experience working in a fast‑paced & dynamic environment
• Proficiency in recruiting, organizing, and motivating teams
• Strong product intuition and experience collaborating with cross‑functional engineering teams

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not…