Senior Software Engineer - AI Initiative

Role

Senior Software Engineer on Rippling’s AI Platform team focused on building foundational platform capabilities that power AI across HR, IT, Finance, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, Compliance, and internal workflows. The role is highly hands-on with roughly 60% of the time spent coding, debugging, reviewing code, and owning implementation from design to production.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core AI platform systems such as background agents, automated workflows, evaluation systems, data pipelines, and model quality feedback loops.
• Implement systems that enable AI agents to automate enterprise workflows while respecting permissions, approvals, auditability, and compliance requirements.
• Build self-healing and self-improving workflows that detect negative product signals and assist with root-cause identification.
• Own components end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers, Product, Infra, and Platform stakeholders to convert ambiguous problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Participate in design discussions, code reviews, production support, observability improvements, and operational debugging.

Requirements

• 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or product engineering.
• Strong, hands-on coding ability; candidate is expected to spend approximately 60% of time writing and reviewing production-quality code.
• Proficiency in one or more backend/general-purpose languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience building and operating scalable backend/platform systems in production, including APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, observability, and troubleshooting.
• Strong system design fundamentals and ability to independently own moderately ambiguous technical problems through delivery and iteration.
• Strong collaboration and product judgment; ability to work effectively with cross-functional and senior engineering stakeholders.
• Practical curiosity or exposure to AI agents, LLM infrastructure, agentic workflows, ML/data infrastructure, inference pipelines, or evaluation and automation systems is a strong plus.

Nice to have

• Prior experience at a high-growth/hyper-growth startup or product-led company.
• Recent hands-on exposure to AI agents, LLM tooling, AI infrastructure, automation platforms, evaluation systems, or data/ML pipelines.
• Strong Python knowledge for AI/ML infrastructure and automation, and strong SQL for data-heavy systems and analytics.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, reliability platforms, developer productivity tools, permissions/approvals/auditability, or enterprise SaaS domains (fintech, HR tech, payroll).

Technical Skills

• Backend and platform development, distributed systems, APIs, databases, concurrency, observability, production debugging, and operational ownership.
• Languages explicitly called out as preferred: Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, C#.
• Familiarity with AI-related infrastructure concepts: AI agents, LLM infrastructure, inference pipelines, evaluation loops, automation systems, and data/ML infrastructure.

Notes

This role emphasizes deep ownership, rapid iteration in an ambiguous product environment, and growth toward Staff-level scope over time. It is focused on integrating AI functionality into Rippling’s enterprise product context rather than building standalone chatbots.