Staff Software Engineer - Tax
Leads technical strategy and architecture for Rippling’s large-scale tax infrastructure, ensuring reliability, correctness, auditability, and global scalability. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, distributed-systems expertise, and demonstrated influence across teams.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture for mission-critical systems handling billions in tax calculations and make decisions that support 50% year-over-year platform growth.
- Drive initiatives with function-wide visibility, shaping roadmaps and influencing company strategy.
- Define and champion engineering standards across teams and establish scalable engineering patterns.
- Design systems for auditability, correctness, graceful degradation, and high reliability.
- Address architectural challenges involving millions of payroll transactions across multiple countries, 4,000+ jurisdictions, and evolving regulations.
- Represent engineering in cross-functional decisions and translate business needs into technical strategy.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership.
- Proven ability to architect large-scale distributed systems with high reliability requirements.
- Deep expertise in an object-oriented programming language and experience designing systems that other engineers build on.
- Track record of driving technical strategy and influencing decisions across multiple teams.
- Strong ownership mindset, with responsibility from problem identification through resolution.
- Rigorous engineering practices focused on correctness, testing, and operational excellence.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to represent engineering to leadership and stakeholders.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, System Architecture, Technical Strategy, Software Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Testing, Operational Excellence, Payroll Systems, Tax Infrastructure
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