Director of Product, App Platform

Rippling•San Francisco, CA

8d•Onsite

About The Position

Rippling is building a developer platform that lets developers build software on top of Rippling, connect Rippling to custom data, and eventually sell applications to Rippling customers. This role will lead the apps pillar of that platform and turn a set of powerful internal primitives into a coherent developer product. As Director of Product, App Platform, you will define the strategy for Rippling’s application platform and app ecosystem, including the Object Graph, Object Platform, custom apps, workflows, functions, documents, sites, localization, and related capabilities. The right person has built for developers before and can make complex platform architecture feel simple, reliable, and worth building on.

Requirements

12+ years of product management, engineering, platform, or technical product leadership experience.
A track record of building substantial products for developers, such as developer platforms, APIs, infrastructure products, app platforms, marketplaces, workflow platforms, or data platforms.
Strong technical fluency across data models, APIs, permissions, systems boundaries, reliability, tooling, and developer workflows.
Excellent product judgment and the ability to turn fragmented platform capabilities into a clear product strategy and roadmap.
Experience leading product teams, hiring and developing PMs, and operating across executive, engineering, design, GTM, and customer-facing stakeholders.
Comfort creating clarity in ambiguous, early, or newly elevated product areas.

Nice To Haves

experience with third-party developer ecosystems, app marketplaces, AI-native development workflows, coding agents, object graphs, data clouds, or enterprise application platforms.

Responsibilities

Set the App Platform strategy. Define how Rippling’s app primitives come together into a clear, scalable developer platform.
Make developers the customer. Build APIs, schemas, permissions, tooling, documentation, observability, and lifecycle experiences that help developers build confidently.
Lead the Object Graph and Object Platform roadmap. Shape the shared data and platform foundation that first-party teams, solutions teams, customers, and external developers build on.
Enable AI-native app creation. Make the platform usable by AI coding agents through machine-readable interfaces, deterministic behavior, safe permissions, and actionable errors.
Build and lead the team. Hire, coach, and develop product leaders for a broad, technically complex, strategically important product area.
Drive ecosystem impact. Help scale custom apps and create the foundation for third-party developers to build and sell software on Rippling.