Software Engineer I -Data Infrastructure

About 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 $1.8B+ 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.

About The Role

The Data Infrastructure Team is a lean, high-impact group operating in a true founder mode. We are responsible for building and safeguarding all data systems, managing the lifecycle of 500+ production-grade resources across 10+ types of data stores. Our core mission is to build self-serve, automated platforms that ensure our systems are efficient, scalable, and continuously evolving. We don’t just operate systems—we invent them.

What You Will Do

We are looking for enthusiastic, innovative engineers to join our engineering team as Software Engineers (SDE-1). In this role, you’ll collaborate with experienced engineers, contribute to real-world projects from day one, and gain exposure to cutting-edge tools and technologies. You’ll play a key role in building and optimizing products that reach millions of users globally. you will join one of our many teams to develop robust, well-designed products, implement new updates and features, and solve complex problems that affect our business and our clients.

• Invent, design, and build self-serve, automated platforms for managing the lifecycle of 500+ production-grade data resources across 10+ data store types.
• Drive innovation by engineering foundational tooling for all engineering teams, such as the Database Proxy and the database replication services.
• Pioneer and execute complex projects like large-scale, zero-downtime database migrations.
• Go deep into technical architecture, distributed systems, protocol-level debugging, and performance optimization to ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient at petabyte scale.
• Build and maintain the core foundations for strategic initiatives, including multi-region architecture, sandbox environments, and a comprehensive, Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code platform.
• Focus intensely on performance, observability, cost and operability to maintain infrastructure that just works, even when handling ~100 billion queries/day and 10 PB of data transfer.
• Write core libraries like middlewares, ORMs, proxies, rate limiters, shard routers (in Python and Go) to support scalability and developer experience.
• Take end-to-end ownership of projects, from initial design and planning to successful rollout and operation.

What You Will Have

• 1-2 years experience working with fast growing, top tier product companies
• Strong coding in one or more programming languages such as Java, Python, C++, or Go.
• Expert understanding of data structures, algorithms, software design principles and low level design
• Ability to communicate clearly and work effectively in a collaborative environment
• Understanding of system design and complex distributed systems
• Eagerness to learn new technologies and apply them to solve real-world problems.
• Bonus points for open source contributions, competitive coding experience, and a strong Computer Science background from a Tier 1 institution.

Additional Information

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 accomodations@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.