# Senior Staff Software Engineer

**Company:** [Rippling](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/rippling)
**Location:** Bengaluru, India
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Experience:** 15+ years
**Skills:** Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, C#, Distributed Systems, APIs, Databases, Data Modeling, Concurrency, Reliability, Observability, System Design
**Posted:** 2026-08-25

> Senior individual contributor responsible for architecting and building large-scale distributed systems, leading cross-team technical initiatives, and mentoring engineers. Requires 15+ years of hands-on software engineering experience and deep expertise in architecture, reliability, performance, and system design.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own broad, ambiguous, and high-impact technical charters across multiple teams or systems.
- Design and build scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
- Lead architecture and technical strategy for critical platform, backend, infrastructure, or product engineering initiatives.
- Break down complex technical problems into clear execution plans.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and business stakeholders.
- Make technical decisions around scale, reliability, performance, latency, availability, observability, and maintainability.
- Stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, prototyping, and implementation decisions.
- Identify technical risks and drive alignment on durable solutions.
- Mentor Staff, Senior, and mid-level engineers.
- Establish engineering best practices and standards for design, coding, testing, and operations.
- Influence technical direction without formal authority.
- Improve system quality through architecture, operational maturity, incident learnings, and platform thinking.

## Requirements
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering.
- Experience operating at Senior Staff, Principal, or Staff+ technical scope.
- Strong coding, debugging, design, and system-building experience.
- Strong programming ability in one or more backend or general-purpose languages, including Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
- Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
- Deep architecture and system design experience across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance.
- Ability to own ambiguous, cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end.
- Strong technical judgment and ability to balance speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and maintainability.
- Ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
- Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
- Comfort operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
- Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies.
- Experience building financial products at scale.
- Exposure to payroll domains.
- Experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains.
- Ability to operate as a builder-leader who defines direction, aligns stakeholders, and stays close to execution.

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