Staff Full Stack Engineer (Backend) Web Perf

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 $1.4B+ 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 @ Rippling.com addresses.

About the Role

Rippling is building the next generation of global HR and IT systems, and performance is a critical part of that journey.

We are looking for a seasoned Staff Engineer to lead our Web Performance charter - shaping the vision, defining guardrails, and building the foundations for fast, reliable experiences across web, mobile, and mobile web.

In this high-impact platform team role, you’ll define the strategy and guardrails for Rippling’s Web Performance charter, building the foundations for fast, seamless experiences across web, mobile, and platform surfaces.

You’ll shape how performance becomes part of Rippling’s DNA - partnering across teams to deliver world-class speed and reliability at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Rippling’s Web Performance charter - defining the long-term vision & driving end-to-end solutions across frontend and backend.
  
  
• Architect frameworks, libraries, and infrastructure to enable performance monitoring, measurement, and improvements across multiple product teams.
  
  
• Partner with infra, product, and design system teams to re-architect critical paths of the app, and lay groundwork for a modern Rippling foundation.
  
  
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship — guiding engineers through design reviews and performance deep dives while instilling a performance-first culture at Rippling.
  
  
• Establish guardrails, automation, and monitoring to prevent regressions and enforce performance budgets across all teams.
  
  
• Engage in hands-on coding and reviews as a generalist engineer - optimizing React/TypeScript, improving backend APIs, and refining cloud infrastructure.
  
  
• Champion a culture of technical excellence, where performance is treated as a first-class product feature.
  
  
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in AI-assisted development, infra technologies, and modern performance practices, and translate them into actionable changes for Rippling.
  
  

Qualifications

• Experience: 9+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in staff-level or architecture leadership roles.
  
  
• Technical Leadership: Proven success leading large-scale performance initiatives and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
  
  
• Web Performance Expertise: Deep knowledge of BFF architectures, micro frontends, rendering pipelines, caching, bundling, CDN strategies, and network optimizations.
  
  
• Cross-Functional Influence: Strong communication skills and ability to align diverse stakeholders (Product, Design, Infra, Security) around performance goals.
  
  
• Consumer-Grade Applications: Experience building and scaling large consumer-facing products with high expectations for speed and reliability.
  
  
• Strategic thinker with a track record of future-proofing platforms through modernization and performance guardrails.
  
  

Nice to Have

• Experience building mobile web and hybrid app performance strategies.
  
  
• Exposure to AI-driven developer tooling or performance analysis.
  
  
• History of leading migrations in large monolith-to-modernization journeys.
  
  

Additional Information

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 with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process.

To request a reasonable accommodation, please email

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture.

For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

Required Skill Profession

Other General