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 $1.8B+ 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 Team
The Payroll Imports & Onboarding team builds the platform that enables customers to move onto Rippling payroll with speed, accuracy, and minimal manual effort. We own the end-to-end onboarding and payroll import experience across 40+ countries: provider migration workflows, file ingestion and classification, mapping and validation systems, import processing pipelines, completion workflows, and post-import reporting.
Our systems sit at the center of a broad platform surface. We integrate closely with run management, payroll filings, withholdings, tax engine, entity management, payroll setup, and other downstream payroll components to ensure imported data turns into correct payroll configuration and payroll runs. This is a highly cross-functional platform team where communication is critical: success depends not just on building reliable systems, but on designing clear interfaces and coordinating effectively with many partner teams.
We solve complex problems at the intersection of distributed systems, financial correctness, and operational scale. That includes validating messy source data, reconciling imported payrolls against expected outcomes, handling country- and provider-specific workflows, and building fault-tolerant automation that can safely complete imports for companies of very different sizes and levels of complexity.
Every company that onboards Rippling's payroll product goes through our systems, which means we move fast, we build for reliability, and we treat clear cross-team communication as a core engineering skill.
Why This Role
Rare Opportunity
Rippling is looking for a seasoned Senior Software Engineer to join the Payroll Imports & Onboarding team, one of the most strategic teams in the Global Payroll organization. This team directly impacts how quickly and successfully customers can adopt Rippling payroll by removing friction from one of the most important and operationally sensitive parts of the product: migration and onboarding.
In this role, you will architect and build the platform that powers payroll imports from previous providers into Rippling. You’ll work on ingestion pipelines, validation frameworks, import completion orchestration, reconciliation and sanity checks, provider migration workflows, and the platform interfaces that connect imports to downstream payroll systems. You’ll make pragmatic technical decisions in a high-ambiguity space, partner deeply with other engineering and operational teams, and raise the quality bar for reliability, observability, and cross-team execution.
This is an opportunity to own foundational platform work that has outsized business impact: every improvement to import accuracy, automation, speed, and self-serve capability makes it easier for customers to switch to Rippling and trust us with their payroll.
What You Will Do
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Own end-to-end development of core payroll import and onboarding capabilities, from technical design through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration.
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Architect and scale systems for payroll data ingestion, transformation, mapping, and validation across a wide range of providers, formats, and country-specific requirements.
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Build reliable workflows for import completion, reconciliation, sanity checks, and downstream commit creation, ensuring imported data safely propagates into payroll runs and configuration.
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Design and improve self-serve provider migration experiences, including classification, validation, and workflow automation.
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Partner closely with teams across payroll infrastructure, run management, filings, tax, withholdings, and entity management to define robust interfaces and reduce integration friction.
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Improve observability, debugging, and operational tooling for high-stakes onboarding workflows where correctness and turnaround time both matter.
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Lead cross-team technical discussions and drive alignment in a platform-heavy environment where communication and coordination are essential.
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Mentor engineers and raise the team’s standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational excellence.
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Shape product direction by working directly with stakeholders to understand complex international payroll requirements and translate them into scalable technical solutions
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5+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale backend or platform systems.
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Strong backend engineering fundamentals, with experience designing reliable, maintainable systems in Python, Django, or similar stacks.
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Experience building data-intensive workflows such as ETL pipelines, validation systems, import/migration platforms, or other systems that transform messy real-world data into trusted product state.
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Proven track record working on mission-critical systems where correctness, observability, and failure handling are essential.
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Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, especially in distributed workflows with multiple downstream integrations and asynchronous processing.
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Ability to thrive in ambiguous, cross-functional environments and independently drive projects with broad technical and organizational surface area.
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Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to collaborate effectively with partner teams and translate complex requirements into clear technical designs.
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Experience in payroll, fintech, HR tech, or regulated financial systems is a plus.
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High leverage: Every company that onboards onto Rippling's global payroll runs through your systems
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Greenfield AI Leverage: We're actively tackling genuinely novel problems at the intersection of LLMs and financial compliance
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Platform impact: You'll shape and define how multiple Global Payroll teams work together, not just write features in isolation
Communication matters: Unlike teams where engineers can stay heads-down, this role puts you at the center of cross-functional coordination – your voice shapes product direction and team processes
