Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Financial AI Product 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.

Rippling’s Financial Product team builds the systems that power some of the most critical financial workflows for modern businesses — including payroll, payments, reconciliation, compliance, and operational finance.

These products sit at the intersection of money movement, employee trust, customer operations, and regulatory complexity. The work is high stakes: financial systems must be accurate, reliable, auditable, and resilient, even as they handle messy real-world data and complex business rules across customers, countries, and use cases.

We are using AI to make these workflows dramatically simpler. That means building systems that can interpret inconsistent data, automate manual review, surface exceptions, explain outcomes, and accelerate implementation — while preserving the deterministic controls financial products require. The goal is not AI for its own sake; it is practical, production-grade AI that helps customers run financial workflows with more speed, confidence, and accuracy.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will help define how AI becomes a core part of financial product and infrastructure at Rippling.

• Build AI-powered product capabilities for complex financial workflows such as onboarding, data ingestion, reconciliation, validation, exception handling, and operational review.
• Design systems that combine model-driven reasoning with deterministic financial execution.
• Build workflows that trace financial values back to source evidence, surface unresolved gaps, and prevent downstream execution when validation fails.
• Create ingestion and normalization systems that can handle messy exports, historical records, customer-provided files, and inconsistent provider formats.
• Develop evals, testing harnesses, observability, and feedback loops to measure AI quality in workflows where “almost always right” is not good enough.
• Partner closely with product, design, operations, compliance, and platform teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities and turn them into reliable product capabilities.
• Work through ambiguous product areas, prototype quickly, and scale successful solutions into reusable product and platform primitives.
• Help set the engineering bar for correctness, auditability, security, reliability, and production safety in AI-enabled and new AI native financial products.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at meaningful scale.
• Experience designing backend systems, data models, APIs, workflows, or platform infrastructure for complex business domains.
• Strong judgment around reliability, correctness, edge cases, and operational risk.
• Interest in applied AI, LLMs, agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction, or AI-assisted workflows.
• Ability to reason clearly about where AI should be used, where deterministic systems should take over, and how to build guardrails around model-driven workflows.
• Product sense and comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where the right answer is not obvious upfront.
• Ability to partner with product managers, domain experts, operations teams, and engineers to turn messy real-world workflows into simple, scalable software.
• A high-ownership mindset: you can take a problem from vague customer pain through architecture, implementation, rollout, measurement, and iteration.

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.