Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure

What you will do

• Design and implement the next generation of our cloud infrastructure to support a 4x increase in system load, ensuring resilience and performance at scale.
• Own the evolution of our K8s ecosystem, ensuring our core monolith and growing microservices environment remain performant and developer-friendly.
• Leverage your product development background to build infrastructure primitives that make it easier for product teams to ship complex features seamlessly.
• Tackle high-order problems related to global consistency, database contention, and high-throughput background processing.
• Work deeply with infrastructure to manage complex distributed systems that power every Rippling product.
• Drive technical consensus on complex, cross-functional initiatives, acting as a bridge between infrastructure and product engineering.
• Engineer high-efficiency resource strategies, optimizing Kubernetes utilization and AWS spend to ensure our infrastructure scales sustainably with our business growth.
• Act as a force multiplier for the Cloud team, setting the standard for code quality and architectural patterns that will define the next decade of Rippling.

What you will need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting and scaling infrastructure.
• Background in product development with an understanding that infrastructure exists to empower developers and serve the end-user.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and a strong grasp of where standard architectural patterns break under extreme load.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes orchestration, including custom controllers, networking, and sophisticated scaling strategies.
• Ability to approach a massive, complex codebase as a fascinating engineering puzzle that requires world-class architectural thinking.
• High proficiency in modern backend languages (Python, Go, or Java), with a desire to master Python and the ability to dive deep into any stack to solve a bottleneck.