Senior Engineering Manager, Documents Platform

Rippling•Seattle, WA

25d•$207,000 - $345,000•Onsite

About The Position

Rippling is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Documents Platform team. This team is building the foundational backend platform that enables document-centric experiences across Rippling—creating a flexible, scalable set of capabilities that can be used by our own product teams, AI-powered workflows, and, over time, third-party developers. This is a high-impact platform leadership role. Rather than owning a single product surface, your team will build the APIs, services, data models, and distributed systems that make documents a first-class platform primitive across Rippling. The platform will support a broad range of use cases—from document storage and management to workflows involving generation, routing, completion, and signatures—while abstracting away the underlying complexity for the teams building on top of it. You’ll lead a team of engineers while helping define the technical vision and evolution of the platform. The ideal leader combines strong people management with deep technical judgment and is comfortable operating close to architecture, system design, and implementation. This is an opportunity to build infrastructure that sits in the critical path of products and workflows across Rippling and becomes part of the technical fabric of the company.

Requirements

Significant engineering leadership experience, including experience managing and developing high-performing backend or platform engineering teams.
A strong technical foundation in backend engineering, with the depth to actively participate in architecture and system design discussions.
Experience building and operating large-scale platforms, infrastructure, or foundational backend systems used by multiple products or engineering teams.
Deep knowledge of distributed systems, databases, data layers, APIs, and scalable service architectures.
Experience designing abstractions and reusable platform capabilities rather than building exclusively for a single product or use case.
A track record of leading technically complex, cross-functional initiatives with broad organizational impact.
Strong judgment around scalability, reliability, system boundaries, API design, and long-term architectural tradeoffs.
The ability to move between technical strategy, hands-on architectural leadership, people management, and execution.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when working with multiple engineering and product teams that depend on your platform.

Nice To Haves

Experience with document infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow systems, or similarly complex platform domains is a plus.
Experience building infrastructure that powers AI or agentic workflows is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a team of backend and platform engineers responsible for Rippling’s core Documents Platform.
Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for making document capabilities a reusable platform primitive across Rippling.
Build scalable APIs and backend services that allow internal product teams, AI and agentic workflows, and external developers to build document-based experiences.
Drive the evolution of existing document infrastructure into a generalized platform that can serve use cases across Rippling rather than being tightly coupled to any one product area.
Own complex technical decisions across distributed systems, data models, storage, APIs, reliability, and scalability.
Stay deeply engaged in technical design and architecture while creating the environment for engineers to independently execute at a high level.
Partner closely with product and engineering teams across Rippling to understand their requirements and translate them into durable platform capabilities.
Establish clear abstractions and platform interfaces that allow teams to move quickly without needing to understand or rebuild the underlying document infrastructure.
Build for long-term scale, extensibility, reliability, and developer experience as adoption of the platform grows.
Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing engineering team while setting a high bar for technical quality and execution.