About the role
At Rippling, Design is central to our mission to free smart people to tackle hard problems. We build products that automate the operational complexity of running a business—from HR and payroll to IT and finance—so our customers can focus on what matters most. In a world of fragmented, outdated systems, we’re creating a modern, unified platform where thoughtful design turns complexity into clarity and confidence.
As the Senior Product Design Manager for HRIS and India Site Lead, you will lead a team of ~6 designers responsible for Rippling's HCM and HRIS products, while serving as the site lead for the broader India design organization, supporting an additional ~5 designers across Payroll, Finance, and Platform. You'll play a key role in growing design talent, strengthening team culture, and partnering with cross-functional leaders to raise the quality and impact of the organization.
Your team owns products at the heart of how companies manage their workforce, from core employee records to onboarding, compliance, and global workforce operations. You'll lead the evolution of these experiences while helping define Rippling's AI-first future, designing intelligent workflows and agentic experiences that automate HR work at scale.
Success in this role requires a leader who can navigate highly complex product domains, think in systems, and balance long-term platform strategy with exceptional product execution. You'll empower your team to solve challenging customer problems, raise the bar for design craft, and shape experiences that millions of employees and HR administrators rely on every day.
What you will do
- Lead and grow a team of product designers across the HCM product suite, driving high-impact work across HR, Talent, Benefits, and Workforce Management.
- Design and deliver complex, business-critical experiences that are intuitive, scalable, and trustworthy across global and regulatory contexts.
- Define and drive AI-native experiences that radically simplify administrator and employee workflows—leveraging automation, intelligent defaults, and agentic systems to reduce operational overhead.
- Set a high bar for craft, quality, and execution—mentoring designers, providing actionable feedback, and creating an environment where designers do the best work of their careers.
- Drive end-to-end product thinking—from early problem definition and research through execution and iteration—across both 0→1 initiatives and mature product areas.
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and cross-functional stakeholders to define product strategy, prioritize initiatives, and deliver against ambitious roadmaps.
- Establish and reinforce systems thinking across the team—creating patterns and frameworks that scale across products and ensure consistency across Rippling’s platform.
- Translate complex operational, compliance, and workforce challenges into simple, elegant user experiences for both administrators and employees.
- Champion a deep understanding of customers, especially in high-complexity domains like global HR, compliance, and hourly workforce management.
- Contribute to and evolve Rippling’s design system, ensuring consistency and quality across surfaces while enabling teams to move quickly.
- Drive alignment across teams working on interdependent systems, ensuring cohesive experiences across HRIS, Time, and the broader Rippling platform.
- Serve as the India Site Lead for Design, fostering a vibrant local office culture, driving team collaboration, and providing site-wide operational leadership.
What you will need
- 10+ years of professional product design experience, with 5+ years leading and managing design teams.
- Proven track record of delivering high-impact, customer-facing products in complex domains such as HCM/HRIS, fintech, enterprise software, or workforce management.
- Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and large problem spaces, turning complex systems into intuitive, user-friendly experiences.
- Strong systems thinking, with experience designing across interconnected products or platforms and creating scalable patterns and frameworks.
- Experience defining and shipping AI-native or automation-driven product experiences, including intelligent workflows, decision support, or agentic systems that reduce user effort.
- Experience owning and delivering end-to-end product design—from strategy and roadmap definition through execution and QA.
- Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow designers across different levels of experience, raising the overall quality bar of the team.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional partners and drive alignment across teams.
- Strong product sense and judgment, with the ability to balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.
- A deep customer focus, with experience translating real-world workflows (e.g., HR operations, scheduling, compliance) into effective product experiences.
- A bias toward action and ownership—you thrive in fast-paced environments and are comfortable driving clarity and direction in evolving problem spaces.
- Strong leadership presence with the ability to manage site operations and cultivate a high-performing design community in the India office.
If you don't necessarily meet all of these requirements, we still encourage you to apply. Skills transfer in unexpected ways, and diverse perspectives often lead to the most innovative solutions.
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 $1.85B+ 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.