Director of Engineering - Platform Engineering San Francisco, CA

About The Role Rippling’s Platform organization owns the foundational systems that power the entire company. We support ~1,000 engineers building across dozens of product surfaces, providing the shared infrastructure, developer platforms, and core abstractions that enable teams to move fast without breaking things. At the core of the platform is a dynamically stitched, permissioned ontology, a high-performance object store, an event-driven dependency system, and Rippling Query Language (RQL). Together, these power critical systems like workflows & automation, group management, application building, search & AI platform, and our object graph and data catalog. This role is responsible for scaling these systems and the teams behind them—driving platform strategy, improving developer leverage across the company, and ensuring we continue to deliver reliable, high-impact infrastructure as Rippling grows. What You’ll Do Lead and scale a high‑performing engineering team responsible for core platform systems used across the company Define and drive multi‑quarter platform initiatives that improve developer velocity, system reliability, and product leverage Partner closely with product and engineering leaders to evolve the platform as a product, balancing long‑term architecture with near‑term business needs Take ambiguous, high‑impact problem areas (e.g., system scalability, developer experience, platform abstractions) and turn them into clear execution plans Drive alignment across multiple teams working on complex, interdependent systems including internal platforms, infrastructure, and developer tooling Raise the bar on engineering quality, operational excellence, and execution across the platform organization Qualifications 10+ years of experience building and shipping complex software systems, with a strong focus on distributed systems and platform infrastructure 6+ years of experience managing and growing high‑performing engineering teams Experience owning or contributing to large‑scale internal platforms or developer infrastructure Proven ability to lead complex, cross‑functional initiatives from concept through execution Strong product intuition with the ability to treat platform systems as products for internal users Experience operating in fast‑paced, high‑growth environments with evolving priorities Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent Additional Information We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses. The pay range for this role is: 216,000 - 378,000 USD per year (US Tier 1) #J-18808-Ljbffr Rippling