Senior Software Engineer - AI Platform
Working on core AI platform and LLM/agent infrastructure — building developer-facing AI systems and automation rather than rapid prototyping. Directly involves LLM/agent and eval tooling.
About the Role
Senior Software Engineer on Rippling's AI Platform team building scalable backend and platform systems for AI agents, automated workflows, evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, and reliability infrastructure. The role requires owning production components end-to-end, writing production-quality code (60% hands-on), and mentoring others while working toward staff-level technical ownership.
Job Description
Role
Senior Software Engineer on the AI Platform team responsible for designing, implementing, launching, and operating scalable backend and platform systems that power Rippling’s integrated AI capabilities across product areas (HR, Payroll, Benefits, IT, Finance, etc.). This is a hands-on role with an explicit expectation that ~60% of the work is coding and that engineers independently own components end-to-end.
Key Responsibilities
- Build scalable backend and platform systems for AI agents, automated workflows, evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, sandboxing, reliability, and model-quality infrastructure.
- Own components and services end-to-end: design, implementation, launch, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
- Write production-quality code, perform code reviews, debug production issues, and drive improvements to system reliability and performance.
- Contribute to system design and architecture discussions focused on APIs, data modeling, concurrency, observability, and production operations.
- Improve observability, operational maturity, scalability, and performance of AI platform systems.
- Partner with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders to translate ambiguous problems into production-ready systems.
- Mentor junior engineers and raise engineering quality through reviews and technical guidance.
Requirements
- 5–8 years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or product engineering.
- Strong hands-on coding ability; expectation that ~60% of work is coding.
- Strong programming knowledge in one or more of: Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
- Experience building and operating scalable backend/platform systems in production.
- Good system design fundamentals across APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, observability, debugging, and production operations.
- Ability to independently own well-defined to moderately ambiguous technical problems and operate in fast-paced environments with changing priorities.
- Strong collaboration skills with Product, Infra, Platform, and Engineering stakeholders.
- Practical curiosity or exposure to AI agents, LLM infrastructure, automation systems, ML/data infrastructure, inference pipelines, evals, or adjacent AI systems.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior experience in high-growth or hyper-growth product/startup environments.
- Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
- Experience with workflow orchestration, background automation, reliability platforms, internal tools, or developer productivity platforms.
- Exposure to permissions, approvals, auditability, compliance, or security-sensitive workflows.
- Prior exposure to enterprise SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, or workflow-heavy platforms.