# Staff Software Engineer - Payments

**Company:** [Rippling](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/rippling)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Python, Django, MongoDB, System Architecture, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Observability, Backend Systems
**Posted:** 2026-04-24

> Leads architecture and development of payroll payments engine, owning end-to-end delivery of scalable backend systems for global payment processing. Requires 8+ years experience with expertise in Python/Django, distributed systems, and technical leadership.

## Job Description

## What you will do
- Lead technical architecture for the next generation of our payroll payments engine, designing scalable frameworks that support operations across multiple countries.
- Own the end-to-end delivery of high-impact, complex features, from initial design and technical specifications through to production deployment and monitoring.
- Drive the technical roadmap for the Payroll processing team, identifying and tackling performance bottlenecks, reliability improvements, and architectural refactors.
- Take on ambiguous technical challenges and turn them into concrete, actionable plans for the team.
- Exercise expert technical judgment in building scalable, maintainable, and extensible systems, ensuring data integrity across complex and interdependent services.
- Raise the engineering bar for the entire organization by mentoring senior and junior engineers, leading in-depth design reviews, and championing best practices for code quality, testing, and observability.
- Partner with Product, Risk, Accounting, Tax, Payroll, Ops, and Support to turn ambiguous payment-state problems into durable platform capabilities and intuitive user experiences.

## What you will need
- 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a proven track record of technical leadership and driving org-wide impact.
- Expertise in building large-scale, distributed backend systems. **Strong proficiency in Python and Django is highly preferred**.
- Experience managing the complete project lifecycle, transforming intricate ideas and ambiguous requirements into successful launches independently.
- Deep expertise in system architecture, data modeling, and building core services with clean abstractions.
- A keen product sense and a passion for advocating for the customer, with experience building robust systems that directly impact business-critical flows.
- Outstanding capacity to convey intricate technical concepts clearly and precisely, both in writing and verbally, to diverse functional teams.
- Experience with **MongoDB** or similar NoSQL databases is a strong plus.
- Ability to work independently and take ownership of projects, while also thriving in a team environment.

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