Director of Engineering - Infrastructure

About The Role Rippling Infrastructure operates as a scaled team which owns and operates a variety of mission‑critical systems. We support close to 1,000 Engineers building products and internal platforms at Rippling and deliver the most foundational parts of our internal technical infrastructure as part of the broader Platform organization. The team covers Compute (Containers and Traffic), Data (Document, Object, Relational, Streaming), Observability, Internal Tools, DevX, CI/CD and Application Frameworks and is distributed across 3 countries (US, India, Poland). We have a strong combination of deep technical expertise, technical leadership and the ability to get a lot done in an extremely ambitious (which we are as a company), ambiguous and fast‑moving startup environment. The overall team is running well and individual teams show strong ownership and are well supported by their managers. We are actively hiring into multiple teams and will continue expanding into 2025. We are looking for a leader who can unify the work we do between Observability, Internal Tools and Application Frameworks so that it operates as a cohesive unit at the foundation of our development framework. This will involve developing a compelling 3‑12 month roadmap and executing well on it. The ideal candidate obsesses about delivering developer productivity through data‑driven automation, knows how to design powerful framework solutions that stay out of the way and has strong developer empathy. They operate well across internal customer teams with multiple competing priorities in a dynamic environment. What You'll Do Act as a technical leader within the Engineering organization. Identify and advocate for high‑impact projects that involve multiple stakeholders across the organization. Take ambiguous technical and organizational problem statements, turn them into an actionable plan and then execute it with the team. Execute and drive alignment against requirements involving complex and interdependent systems related to internal development platforms, the infrastructure that underpin them and the developer tools that support them. Qualifications 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in technical leadership/management roles. Preferred experience in building out framework and infrastructure solutions used by internal developers in a fast‑paced DevOps environment. Preferred experience in building, and/or leading teams that have built tooling, compute infrastructure and data infrastructure serving internal teams. Bonus points for experience in developer tooling and reliability. Preferred experience in our technology stack: Python, Django, Golang, React, MongoDB, Trino, Pinot, Kafka, Postgres, AWS. Ability to thrive in an ambiguous environment by identifying areas of impact and independently pursuing them. A track record of influencing and enabling forward‑thinking technology decisions across a wide organization. Excellent ability to communicate complex technical ideas with clarity and precision in written and verbal modes. Benefits Pay range: $216,000 - $378,000 USD per year (US Tier1). #J-18808-Ljbffr