Staff Full Stack Software Engineer (Backend) - Agentic Talent Platform

Rippling•San Francisco, CA

1h•$189,000 - $315,000•Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead Rippling’s Agentic Talent platform, a world where people and AI agents work together. As a technical leader, your goal is to create intuitive experiences for people alongside secure, reliable capabilities that enable agents to understand context, take action, and coordinate complex talent workflows. Close partnership with Product and AI Platform leadership will be central to defining the vision, prototyping new ideas, and building products that fundamentally reshape how organizations manage talent throughout the employee lifecycle. Architecture ownership goes hand in hand with deep, hands-on development. The scope spans building and operating highly available, scalable systems; owning critical software throughout its lifecycle; and mentoring senior and earlier-career engineers on a fast-moving team with tremendous impact. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, builds from first principles, and wants to create category-defining products backed by one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world. Success requires strong product judgment, an obsession with customer behavior, and a drive to replace repetitive processes with intelligent, adaptable workflows.

Requirements

8+ years of full stack software development experience, including designing and operating large-scale systems.
Strong command of computer science fundamentals and distributed-system design, including asynchronous processing, caching, data modeling, and database scaling.
Experience designing extensible services, APIs, or primitives used across multiple products and workflows.
A deep interest in customer behavior, product design, and delivering intuitive, polished experiences.
A track record of navigating ambiguity, defining technical direction, scoping complex work, reviewing designs, and helping other engineers grow.
Comfort operating in fast-moving, unstructured environments and proactively identifying opportunities to improve both the product and how the team builds it.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Python, Django, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, clean abstractions, and event-driven architectures is strongly preferred.
On the front end side, React experience is preferred.

Responsibilities

Build scalable, maintainable, high-performance systems that power critical talent products and workflows.
Deliver high-quality capabilities quickly while balancing iteration speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
Lead architectural decisions across the product lifecycle, from early prototypes through production.
Apply systems thinking to build fault-tolerant, highly available, scalable, and extensible systems.
Establish strong standards for observability, reliability, incident response, and continuous improvement.
Partner closely with product managers, designers, AI Platform engineers, and customers to shape the roadmap and turn ambiguous problems into compelling products.
Raise the technical bar through design reviews, thoughtful abstractions, engineering best practices, and mentorship across experience levels.
As an early member, directly influence the team’s technical direction, culture, structure, and ways of working.