Full Stack Engineer; Backend - ATS 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.

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We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) team and lead the vision and execution of AI-powered capabilities across our product. As the dedicated AI owner for ATS, you will be responsible for designing and building features that help hiring teams identify and engage with the best candidates more effectively.

This is a highly visible and impactful role where you will partner closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to bring intelligence into every step of the recruiting process. You will navigate ambiguous problem spaces, translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions, and serve as the go-to expert for AI within ATS.

In this role, you will shape the future of how recruiting teams use AI to make better decisions, streamline workflows, and unlock insights from the rich data inside Rippling.

• Take ownership of all AI-driven capabilities within the ATS product, from concept through delivery.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and cross-functional partners to identify opportunities where AI can meaningfully improve the recruiting experience.
• Design and build scalable systems that leverage large volumes of structured and unstructured recruiting data, including resumes, applications, interview feedback, and candidate interactions.
• Drive clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, creating actionable technical plans and delivering solutions that meet customer needs .
• Mentor other engineers on best practices for building and integrating AI-powered features.
• Partner with go-to-market and customer-facing teams to gather feedback, validate assumptions, and iterate quickly on new capabilities.
• Champion AI-first thinking within ATS and act as the subject matter expert for all AI-related initiatives

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including several years building production systems at scale.
• Proven experience delivering end-to-end product features, from technical design to customer impact.
• Strong system design and architecture skills, with the ability to think across multiple domains (product, data, and infrastructure).
• Hands-on experience working with both structured and unstructured data, ideally within data-heavy or ML-driven products.
• Familiarity with AI and ML technologies such as embeddings, semantic search, LLMs, or NLP-based systems.
• A strong product mindset and a track record of using engineering to create customer value.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially when working with cross-functional partners.
• A willingness to operate in ambiguous spaces, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and move quickly while maintaining technical excellence.

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…