Senior Engineering Manager - Tax Platform

What You Will Need

• Technical depth: Read code, debug production issues, review architecture, and identify root causes in complex systems.
• Operational transformation: Drive high-toil, operationally demanding systems toward stability and autonomy by fixing systemic issues.
• Product and platform experience: Build scalable platform systems end-to-end while owning technical architecture and product outcomes.
• Stakeholder collaboration: Work cross-functionally with Payroll, Compliance, Finance Engineering, and global stakeholders.
• Execution: Set roadmaps, define milestones, and ship in high-ambiguity environments.
• People leadership: Minimum 5 years in a managerial role, including 2+ years managing managers, with 7–8 years as an individual contributor beforehand.
• Domain affinity: Payroll, tax, fintech, or high-correctness financial systems experience is strongly preferred.
• Communication: Communicate clearly and effectively across distributed teams and with non-engineering stakeholders.
• Experience: 12–17 years total, combining individual contributor and managerial experience.

Responsibilities

• Take direct ownership of reducing operational burden by identifying root causes of recurring failures, manual workflows, and correctness gaps.
• Drive systematic fixes rather than workarounds until the tax engine runs autonomously with minimal human intervention.
• Own and evolve the engine computing federal, state, and local taxes across 5,000+ US tax codes for millions of employees.
• Maintain correctness and sub-SLA latency as non-negotiable constraints.
• Lead AI-powered tax explainability, surfacing granular, human-readable explanations for every tax calculation and referencing the underlying rule, rate table, or exemption.
• Architect the tax computation pipeline for companies with 50,000+ employees within strict SLAs.
• Solve for parallelism, caching, incremental recomputation, and latency under payroll-run pressure.
• Design and ship abstractions that expand the tax engine beyond the US into 10+ countries.
• Build a jurisdiction-agnostic calculation framework supporting PAYE, social contributions, withholding tables, and multi-tier brackets.
• Build tooling and frameworks that enable new-country tax-rule launches without rewriting the engine.

Benefits and Other Information

• Rippling values employees working in-office to foster collaboration and company culture.
• Office-based employees are currently expected to work in the office at least three days per week.