Product Lead, Developer Experience in San Francisco, California at 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.

The Rippling Developer Platform team is responsible for the products and frameworks that power the integration of HR, IT, Finance, and third-party applications into one unified system. The team owns the foundational building blocks – analytics, workflow automation, permissions, our unified data platform – that every Rippling product is built on.

We're treating the internal developer toolchain as a product, and we’re hiring someone to own it.

Your customers are Rippling's engineers. Hundreds of them, growing weekly, building across every surface of the product. AI coding tools are already transforming how they work. We're packaging them into coherent agentic workflows – inner and outer loops – alongside the dozens of libraries, services, and platform building blocks that are the substrate of Rippling. The goal: make the Developer Platform a force multiplier, improving developer productivity by 2-3x.

This isn't a research role or a strategy role. We'll experiment, but the point is practical impact. Success is measured in developer velocity. You'll help define what that means and how we track it. You're not starting from scratch – Rippling engineers are already building agentic workflows. Your job is to turn that momentum into a product.

• Own the vision and roadmap for Rippling's internal developer toolchain – AI agents, platform primitives, libraries, services, docs
• Work directly with SDEs to identify where DX breaks down and where investment has the highest leverage
• Drive adoption of platform building blocks by making them easier to discover, understand, and use
• Design how agentic coding fits into the Rippling development loop – from scaffolding to review to deployment to verification in production
• Define the metrics that measure developer velocity, and hold the product accountable to improving them

• 8+ years of combined product and/or engineering experience
• Former SDE – not "technical background." You wrote production code, and you know what bad DX feels like from the inside.
• Actively codes – you use AI coding tools today and have strong opinions on them.
• Taste – you know the difference between DX that works and DX that demos well.
• Deep in the AI space – you're tracking how agentic coding is evolving and you have a point of view on where it's going.
• Understands the business case – you can connect DX improvements to developer throughput, hiring leverage, and scale.
• Experience owning platform or developer-facing products.
• Strong alignment with Rippling's leadership principles, particularly "Go and See," "Push Limits," "Are Right, a Lot," and "Change Minds Quickly, But Go."

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 accommodations@rippling.com

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.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.