Staff Software Engineer

What you will do

• Own Omni-Channel Frameworks: Architect the shared, channel-specific logic and infrastructure required to run Rippling AI seamlessly across multiple mediums—including Slack, Teams, Email, CLI, and native desktop shells—without reinventing the architectural wheel for every new channel.
• Engineer the Developer Experience (DevX): Design robust APIs, abstractions, and contract interfaces that empower Rippling’s broader product engineering organization to rapidly build specialized AI capabilities and embed native AI elements straight into their application views.
• Transform Interactive UX Primitives: Lead the evolution of the chat runtime from standard "walls of text" into high-performance, dynamic UI components (e.g., streaming interactive maps, interactive tables, and visual workflows directly inside the response frame).
• Partner on Agent Lifecycle Observability: Collaborate closely with adjacent Automation and Agent teams to establish frontend primitives for background execution engines, designing how system states, admin settings, and conversation histories are securely rendered and audited.
• Drive Cross-Functional Pods: Spearhead distributed technical initiatives connecting platform engineering in San Francisco with specialized core infrastructure teams globally, ensuring tight alignment on system runtime dependencies.
• Champion AI-Native Engineering: Establish best practices for AI-assisted software development, mentoring senior and mid-level engineers on how to safely and effectively leverage LLM tools (Cursor, Claude, Codex) to maximize velocity and code craft.

What you will need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend-leaning fullstack foundation and a proven history of shipping high-scale, platform-level capabilities.
• Experience building scalable, reusable framework architectures for other internal engineering teams, or you have personally guided zero-to-one customer-facing applications through high-growth scale cycles.
• You focus heavily on product experience, technical abstractions, and code durability; you know how to build a unified solution that handles complex state and metadata across multiple communication protocols without falling into over-engineering traps.
• Proven ability to navigate extreme ambiguity, drive technical consensus across complex multi-product matrices, and execute with blitz-scale velocity.
• You don't just use AI because a project dictates it; you are a passionate, daily power user of the frontier toolchain (Claude, Cursor, Codex, or personal agentic workflows) and actively upskill your peers on these technologies.
• Exceptional communication skills, ability to communicate technical details to non technical stakeholders.