What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Engineering Manager, AI Developer Experience position at Rippling?
About Rippling
Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system.
Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.
Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.
We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.
About The Role
Rippling’s Infrastructure organization owns the mission-critical systems that power our entire product ecosystem, supporting over 1,000 engineers through a cohesive “Golden Path” for development.
As a Senior Engineering Manager (M8), you will lead two high-impact, U.S.-based teams: Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Experience. This role sits at the intersection of reliability and innovation—ensuring the stability of a large-scale production environment (including a 24M line monolith) while driving forward modern, AI-powered development workflows.
You will be responsible for scaling our infrastructure by driving engineering excellence, operational rigor, and predictable delivery. Your teams will own Kubernetes cluster management, high availability and disaster recovery strategy, and advanced developer tooling—including AI-assisted workflows and high-concurrency build systems like Bazel and Pants.
The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in AWS, a product mindset for internal platforms, and a track record of leading teams to build and operate high-impact distributed systems.
What You Will Do
Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accommodations@rippling.com
Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.
This role will receive a competitive salary benefits equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.
A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.
The pay range for this role is:
207,000 - 362,250 USD per year(US San Francisco Bay Area)
Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system.
Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.
Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.
We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.
About The Role
Rippling’s Infrastructure organization owns the mission-critical systems that power our entire product ecosystem, supporting over 1,000 engineers through a cohesive “Golden Path” for development.
As a Senior Engineering Manager (M8), you will lead two high-impact, U.S.-based teams: Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Experience. This role sits at the intersection of reliability and innovation—ensuring the stability of a large-scale production environment (including a 24M line monolith) while driving forward modern, AI-powered development workflows.
You will be responsible for scaling our infrastructure by driving engineering excellence, operational rigor, and predictable delivery. Your teams will own Kubernetes cluster management, high availability and disaster recovery strategy, and advanced developer tooling—including AI-assisted workflows and high-concurrency build systems like Bazel and Pants.
The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in AWS, a product mindset for internal platforms, and a track record of leading teams to build and operate high-impact distributed systems.
What You Will Do
- Lead Two Strategic Pillars: Manage Cloud Infrastructure (production reliability, IaC, Kubernetes) and DevX (local development, CI/CD, AI tooling).
- Drive AI-Powered Velocity: Accelerate developer productivity through agentic workflows and AI-assisted tooling.
- Lead Monolith Evolution: Define and execute strategy to incrementally decompose a 24M line monolith into a scalable services architecture.
- Own Production Excellence: Ensure reliability of Rippling.com through strong incident response, postmortems, and safe release practices.
- Develop Senior Talent: Lead and grow a team of engineers
- Set the DevX Vision: Use data and engineering insight to define and evolve the long-term developer experience roadmap.
- Experience at Scale: 8 years in engineering with 4 years managing high-performing teams in high-growth SaaS or platform environments.
- Leadership of Senior ICs: Experience managing and leveling Staff and Principal engineers.
- Infrastructure Depth: Strong expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Helm).
- AI-Forward Mindset: Interest or experience leveraging AI to improve developer workflows (testing, debugging, code generation).
- Comfort with Ambiguity: Proven ability to build systems, tooling, and processes in fast-moving, undefined environments.
- Large-Scale Systems Experience: Experience operating large codebases and leading complex architectural evolution.
Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics, Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accommodations@rippling.com
Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.
This role will receive a competitive salary benefits equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.
A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.
The pay range for this role is:
207,000 - 362,250 USD per year(US San Francisco Bay Area)