About the role
Rippling is looking for a technical and product-minded Engineering Manager (M7) to lead our Time Off and Leave Management team. This is a foundational product area that sits at the intersection of employee experience, compliance, and payroll accuracy.
This role is a unique blend of high-stakes product execution and deep systems engineering. You will lead a team responsible for building and scaling a highly configurable leave management system that supports a wide range of policies, accrual models, approval workflows, and regulatory requirements across geographies. The system must handle everything from simple PTO tracking to complex extended leave scenarios, while integrating seamlessly with payroll, benefits, and broader workforce systems.
You will also drive a critical architectural evolution from policy-based logic to flexible, reusable primitives—enabling the platform to model increasingly complex leave scenarios with consistency and minimal engineering overhead.
What you will do
- Drive Execution: Lead a full-stack team of 8+ engineers to deliver against a high-priority roadmap, balancing near-term product needs with long-term platform investments.
- Own a Complex Domain: Build systems that manage leave policies, accruals, balances, approval workflows, and holiday calendars—ensuring correctness, flexibility, and a seamless user experience.
- Design for Edge Cases: Develop scalable solutions that handle nuanced scenarios such as extended leave (e.g., parental, medical, or unpaid leave), including their downstream impact on payroll, benefits, and system access.
- Architect Global Primitives: Evolve the system beyond hard-coded logic into a flexible, primitive-based engine that can support diverse and changing requirements across regions and companies.
- Scale the Team: Raise the bar on engineering and leadership excellence by strengthening technical rigor, improving operational processes, and mentoring senior engineers. You will partner closely with a Staff Engineer to drive long-term technical vision.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely with Product and partner teams to ensure Time Off integrates cleanly with payroll, benefits, compliance, and other core platform systems.
- Innovate with AI: Leverage internal AI capabilities to introduce automation and intelligence into leave management workflows.
- Maintain High Quality: Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of a system that serves as a daily touchpoint for employees and managers.
What you will need
- Experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2–4+ years in an engineering management role, ideally within a high-growth environment.
- Technical Depth: Strong technical foundation with the ability to lead system design for distributed systems and engage deeply in architectural decisions when needed.
- Product Mindset: You think beyond features and focus on building durable, flexible systems that support complex business workflows.
- Experience with Complexity: Experience working in domains with high correctness requirements and complex business logic (e.g., Fintech, HR Tech, Payroll, or Workforce Management) is highly preferred.
- High Agency: Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements. You make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed and long-term scalability.
- Leadership Excellence: Demonstrated success in hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers while fostering a culture of accountability and high performance.
Additional Information
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.
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.