Software Engineer, Payroll Calculation

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.

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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Payroll is one of the most mission‑critical systems a company runs. It has to be correct, compliant, explainable, scalable, and trusted by every employee who depends on it. At Rippling, payroll is also one of our biggest product and engineering frontiers: we’re expanding upmarket to serve much larger companies, scaling internationally across new jurisdictions, and rebuilding core calculation infrastructure for a future where payroll is more automated, transparent, and intelligent.

The Payroll Calculation team owns the systems that determine earnings, deductions, taxes, loans, garnishments, pensions, contributions, and jurisdiction‑specific payroll logic. These systems sit at the intersection of distributed systems, product engineering, compliance, data modeling, and customer experience. A great payroll calculation platform does more than produce the right number; it helps admins and internal teams understand why that number is right.

As Rippling serves larger enterprise customers and expands native payroll into more countries, the team is building the technical foundation for payroll at global scale. That means designing calculation frameworks that are configurable, versioned, auditable, debuggable, and explainable, while evolving the architecture to support dramatically more volume and complexity.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help lead this work. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role for an engineer who wants to build mission‑critical systems, set architectural direction, develop exceptional teams, and make payroll accurate, understandable, and dependable at global scale.

• Lead architecture and technical strategy for Rippling’s payroll calculation systems.
• Write critical production code and lead from the front on high‑impact technical initiatives.
• Design frameworks that make payroll logic configurable, versioned, testable, explainable, scalable, and easy to debug.
• Leverage AI to make payroll logic easier to build, validate, explain, and operate, without compromising accuracy, auditability, or control.
• Build systems that support enterprise‑scale payroll for large employers with complex legal‑entity structures and approval workflows.
• Help expand Rippling’s native payroll capabilities across new countries and jurisdictions.
• Drive improvements in distributed systems, database performance, caching, reliability, and operability.
• Partner cross‑functionally with product, design, payroll operations, HRIS, and other…