Senior Engineering Manager, Tools and Observability

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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Rippling’s Infrastructure organization owns the foundational systems that power every product and service across the company. Supporting more than 1,000 engineers and millions of end users, the Tools and Observability team builds the internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure that help engineers develop, operate, and troubleshoot services at scale.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead the team responsible for improving developer productivity and providing visibility into the health of Rippling’s production systems. This includes internal tooling, platform self‑service capabilities, and the logging, metrics, tracing, and error‑monitoring infrastructure engineers rely on to understand system behavior and debug production issues.

You will partner closely with engineering teams across the organization to identify friction in their workflows, build reliable and intuitive tools, and make it easier to deliver and operate high‑quality software as Rippling continues to scale.

• Lead and grow a team responsible for Rippling’s internal developer tooling and observability infrastructure
• Define the long‑term technical strategy and roadmap for developer productivity, tooling, and observability
• Build and evolve internal tools and self‑service capabilities that simplify how engineers develop, troubleshoot, and operate services
• Own the reliability, scalability, and usability of logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and error‑monitoring systems
• Partner with engineering teams to understand their needs, prioritize improvements, and drive adoption of shared tools and platforms
• Establish best practices for instrumentation, actionable alerting, and production debugging
• Lead initiatives across engineering organizations that improve developer workflows and reduce operational overhead
• Develop and mentor engineers while maintaining a strong culture of ownership and technical excellence
• Drive improvements in observability coverage, platform performance, and cost efficiency

• 8+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience
• 4+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience leading teams that build internal developer tools, shared engineering platforms, or observability infrastructure
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems and cloud‑based production environments
• Experience building or operating logging, metrics, tracing, or error‑monitoring systems at scale
• A strong developer experience mindset, with the ability to translate engineering needs into intuitive, widely adopted tools
• Strong operational judgment, including experience improving production troubleshooting, alerting, and incident response
  
  Experience developing senior engineers, Staff Engineers, and Principal Engineers
• Excellent cross‑functional leadership and communication skills, with…