Senior Engineering Manager - Payments Experience

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 is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager (M8) to lead the transformation of Payments Experience, owning the layer that powers how employers, employees, and contractors move money. You will define a new standard for how people interact with money at Rippling. You will build experiences that are performant, intuitive, and AI-first, abstracting away the complexity of payments while giving users clear answers, proactive guidance, and simple paths to resolution when things go wrong. This team sits at the center of one of Rippling’s most critical workflows, bridging payroll logic and the underlying payment processing systems to ensure money moves accurately, reliably, and at scale. Your mandate will go beyond building experiences for individual products: you will platformize payments into reusable capabilities that can power any fintech product at Rippling, creating common primitives, workflows, and abstractions that allow teams to build and launch new financial products faster, while increasingly bringing existing product payment experiences onto this shared platform and owning that experience end-to-end over time. This is a highly cross-functional role partnering closely with Money Movement, Tax, Contractor, and Global Payroll teams. You will own the full-stack experience for employers and their employees and contractors, while driving innovation in new product areas like contractor wallets and modern payout methods. This is a unique opportunity to be the first leader fully owning Payments Experience at Rippling, shaping the strategy, architecture, organization, and product direction for a critical and rapidly growing domain. What you will do

• Own the Payments experience: Lead the systems and product layer that define how money moves through execution readiness, status, recovery, and user-facing resolution.
• Build AI-first experiences: Use AI to make payments more proactive and understandable—surfacing anomalies, explaining payment outcomes, anticipating issues, answering questions, and helping users resolve problems without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
• Platformize and unify payments experience across Rippling: Build reusable payment capabilities, APIs, workflows, and abstractions that can be leveraged across Rippling’s fintech products, enabling teams to launch new financial products faster while gradually bringing existing, product-specific payment experiences onto a common platform and taking increasing end-to-end ownership of the unified experience over time.
• Shape long-term strategy: Define the roadmap for Payments Experience and the broader payments platform, with the opportunity to expand ownership into additional product-layer payment experiences across Rippling.
• Define the product/platform boundary: Establish the architecture and operating model that separates shared payment capabilities from product-specific logic, enabling teams across Rippling to build new financial products quickly and consistently.
• Build a world-class payments experience: Create fast, intuitive, and easy-to-understand experiences that abstract away payment complexity while maintaining high standards for latency, reliability, resilience, and global-scale performance.
• Build the future of contractor payments: Own the “Balance” (wallet) product, enabling contractors to receive and manage earnings across multiple clients with modern withdrawal methods like crypto, instant transfer payment methods and more in the future.
• Operate at global scale: Work with globally distributed engineering and non-engineering teams and ensure reliability across high-volume payment systems, with a strong focus on operational excellence, observability, fault tolerance, and recovery What you will need
• AI product mindset: Curiosity and experience applying AI to improve product experiences, automate workflows, surface insights, or make complex systems easier for users to understand and navigate.
• Proven engineering leadership: Experience leading organizations of 10+ engineers, including senior a