Skip to content
RipplingRipplingSan Francisco, CA

Senior Software Engineer, Backend - AI Platform

As a Senior Software Engineer on the AI Platform team, you will own end-to-end technical design and implementation for high-impact AI platform initiatives. You will build scalable agent infrastructure, design observable and self-correcting systems, and mentor junior engineers.

168k – 280k
Hybrid5+ YOEML Engineering

About the role

What you will do

  • Own end-to-end technical design and implementation for high-impact AI platform initiatives from design through production
  • Collaborate closely with engineers across product, infra, and platform organizations
  • Build scalable agent infrastructure that automates repetitive, high-frequency workflows across Rippling's product surface
  • Design systems that are observable, self-correcting, and capable of improving over time with minimal human intervention
  • Develop harness and platform capabilities that encode business logic and institutional knowledge into reliable, automated workflows
  • Partner closely with Product to ensure AI-powered surfaces are trustworthy, controllable, and intuitive for end users and admins
  • Mentor junior engineers, contribute to best practices for AI platform development, and raise the technical bar on your team
  • Track the frontier, translate model capability improvements into architectural decisions and move quickly when new approaches unlock better outcomes

What you will need

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of owning and delivering complex technical projects
  • Strong expertise in platform and distributed systems engineering — you've built reliable, observable, large-scale systems
  • Strong hands-on coding skills; you are an active, high-output contributor in the codebase
  • Experience driving technical initiatives end-to-end, including collaborating across teams to deliver outcomes
  • Strong product instincts — you translate ambiguous problems into durable platform capabilities and partner effectively with product teams
  • Clear, precise communication to diverse audiences, both written and verbal
  • Comfort with ambiguity and high velocity; the roadmap evolves as the technology evolves
  • Recent hands-on experience building AI agents is a plus

Additional Information

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.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity.

Skills

Distributed SystemsPlatform EngineeringAI AgentsSystem DesignSoftware Engineering

Similar roles

ML Engineering jobs
Ambient.ai

Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure

Ambient.aiRedwood City, CA

Build and optimize scalable AI infrastructure for real-time inference, evaluation, and continuous improvement of LLMs, LVMs, computer vision, and multimodal models on large-scale video data. Requires 4+ years production ML systems experience, strong Python skills, and expertise in inference optimization and model serving.

168k – 205k
Hybrid4+ YOEML Engineering
Drata

Senior Applied Research Engineer

DrataSan Francisco, CA

Senior Applied Research Engineer driving AI system quality through experimentation and evaluation of RAG, retrieval, and reasoning systems. Requires 5+ years applied ML/NLP experience with strong Python and evaluation methodology skills.

167k – 226k
Hybrid5+ YOEML Engineering
Drata

Senior AI Engineer, Agent Harness

DrataSan Francisco, CA

Senior AI Engineer to design, build, and scale agentic AI systems using LLMs for compliance automation. Own end-to-end development of production LLM + retrieval + agent workflows with focus on responsible AI.

167k – 226k
Hybrid5+ YOEML Engineering
Mercury

Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer

MercurySan Francisco, CA +2

Build and operate Mercury's real-time ML inference platform for fraud risk decisioning. Own model deployment, observability, and lifecycle tooling with strong backend Python fundamentals.

167k – 208k
Hybrid5+ YOEML Engineering
Talkiatry

Senior AI Engineer

TalkiatryUnited States

Build full-stack AI systems including agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and production infrastructure for mental healthcare applications. Requires 2+ years software engineering experience and 1+ year with LLMs or agentic AI.

170k – 195k
Remote2+ YOEML Engineering