Principal Software Engineer - Global Payroll

Principal Software Engineer - Global Payroll

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.

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Rippling Payroll is redefining how companies pay their people across the world — turning payroll from a cost center into a strategic advantage. Built on Rippling Unity — our unified workforce platform — Payroll connects HR, IT, and Finance so every policy, approval, and pay calculation automatically stays in sync across systems and countries.

With $750M+ ARR, >23,000 customers, and >$70B in annualized payroll volume, we’re building the most intelligent, automated, and compliant payroll infrastructure on the planet.

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to help architect and scale Rippling’s next-generation Global Payroll Platform — a system that powers payments, compliance, and computation for millions of employees across 50+ countries.

This role sits at the intersection of AI-powered automation
, compliance-as-code
, and massive scale — with direct ownership over core systems that define how Rippling processes global payroll, taxes, and payments at sub-second latency and near-zero error tolerance.

• Architect Rippling’s next-gen Payroll computation engine — modular, extensible, and capable of encoding multi-jurisdictional compliance logic declaratively.
• Design data models and pipelines that handle versioned pay runs, audit trails, retroactive corrections, and time-based computations at global scale.
• Build scalable rules engines to automate ever-changing tax, benefits, and labor laws across jurisdictions, ensuring compliance through dynamic, AI-generated logic.
• Modernize global payment infrastructure for real-time or near-instant disbursements while balancing reconciliation, fraud detection, and regulatory constraints.
• Evolve reporting and permissions systems to deliver real-time insights and granular access controls for complex, multi-entity organizations.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, and Finance teams to convert ambiguous regulatory specs into clear, deterministic system behavior.
• Lead high-impact initiatives like sandboxed “simulation” payrolls, AI-powered paystub explainability, and what-if analysis for enterprises.
• Shape the long-term platform vision
  , influencing 150+ engineers across Finance and HR Infrastructure as a multiplier, mentor, and architectural authority.

• System Reliability: Sub-second computation accuracy for global pay runs, with zero critical compliance defects.
• Extensibility: New countries, pay types, and tax rules added with minimal engineering overhead.
• Performance: Orders of magnitude improvement in latency and cost efficiency across distributed computation.
• Developer Velocity: Simplified APIs, testing frameworks, and onboarding for internal and partner developers.
• Business Impact: Reduction in country onboarding time, payroll failure rates, and manual compliance interventions.

• 18+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems in high-compliance or high-integrity domains (Finance, Payroll, Tax, Insurance, etc.).
• Deep expertise in data architecture
  , domain-driven design
  , and rule-based / event-driven systems
  .
• Experience scaling compliance-heavy, multi-country systems — ideally payroll, tax, or financial computation platforms.
• Proficiency in designing modular…