Principal Payroll Systems Architect

Job description

About Rippling

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 $1.85B+ 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 @Rippling.Com addresses.

About Rippling Payroll

Rippling Payroll is redefining how companies pay their people across the world — turning payroll from a cost center into a strategic advantage.

Built on Rippling Unity — our unified workforce platform — Payroll connects HR, IT, and Finance so every policy, approval, and pay calculation automatically stays in sync across systems and countries.

With $750M+ ARR, >
23,000 customers, and >
$70B in annualized payroll volume, we’re building the most intelligent, automated, and compliant payroll infrastructure on the planet.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P10) to help architect and scale Rippling’s next-generation Global Payroll Platform — a system that powers payments, compliance, and computation for millions of employees across 50+ countries.

This role sits at the intersection of AI-powered automation, compliance-as-code, and massive scale — with direct ownership over core systems that define how Rippling processes global payroll, taxes, and payments at sub-second latency and near-zero error tolerance.

What You’ll Own

• Architect Rippling’s next-gen Payroll computation engine — modular, extensible, and capable of encoding multi-jurisdictional compliance logic declaratively.
• Design data models and pipelines that handle versioned pay runs, audit trails, retroactive corrections, and time-based computations at global scale.
• Build scalable rules engines to automate ever-changing tax, benefits, and labor laws across jurisdictions, ensuring compliance through dynamic, AI-generated logic.
• Modernize global payment infrastructure for real-time or near-instant disbursements while balancing reconciliation, fraud detection, and regulatory constraints.
• Evolve reporting and permissions systems to deliver real-time insights and granular access controls for complex, multi-entity organizations.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, and Finance teams to convert ambiguous regulatory specs into clear, deterministic system behavior.
• Lead high-impact initiatives like sandboxed “simulation” payrolls, AI-powered paystub explainability, and what-if analysis for enterprises.
• Shape the long-term platform vision, influencing 150+ engineers across Finance and HR Infrastructure as a multiplier, mentor, and architectural authority.

What Success Looks Like

• System Reliability: Sub-second computation accuracy for global pay runs, with zero critical compliance defects.
• Extensibility: New countries, pay types, and tax rules added with minimal engineering overhead.
• Performance: Orders of magnitude improvement in latency and cost efficiency across distributed computation.
• Developer Velocity: Simplified APIs, testing frameworks, and onboarding for internal and partner developers.
• Business Impact: Reduction in country onboarding time, payroll failure rates, and manual compliance interventions.

What We’re Looking For

• 18+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems in high-compliance or high-integrity domains (Finance, Payroll, Tax, Insurance, etc.).
• Deep expertise in data architecture, domain-driven design, and rule-based / event-driven systems.
• Experience scaling compliance-heavy, multi-country systems — ideally payroll, tax, or financial computation platforms.
• Proficiency in designing modular service boundaries, ensuring backward compatibility and auditability.
• Strong understanding of computation correctness, versioned state, precision handling, and retroactive adjustments.
• Proven ability to partner across functions — translating legal/compliance constraints into elegant, maintainable systems.
• A strong architectural voice who can both design systems and mentor teams to scale them sustainably.

Bonus Points

• Experience with AI-driven system automation or compliance-as-code frameworks.
• Hands-on work with global payroll systems, real-time payments, or statutory tax logic.
• Familiarity with event sourcing, CQRS, streaming pipelines, and immutable data stores.
• Contributions to open-source distributed computation frameworks or rule engines.

Why Rippling

• Backed by world-class investors (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Bedrock, GIC, Elad Gil, Goldman Sachs)
• Valued among the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history
• Build at the heart of Rippling’s Finance platform, where Payroll, Spend, Bill Pay, and Banking converge into a unified ecosystem.
• Join a team that pushes the limits of possible, builds winning systems, and moves fast with conviction.

Required Skill Profession

Computer Occupations