Senior Engineering Manager - Tax Platform

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses 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.

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 of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

• About the Tax Platform:

Rippling's Tax Calculation engine is the computational core of our payroll platform - the system that ensures every dollar withheld and remitted is accurate, compliant, and explainable for every employee, in every jurisdiction, at any scale. This role leads the team responsible for computing taxes correctly across 5,000+ US tax codes for 1M+ employees today, and expanding that precision globally to 10+ countries tomorrow.

The team is at a critical inflection point. We are making significant investments to stabilize and harden the tax engine - reducing operational toil, eliminating manual interventions, and building toward a system that is fully autonomous and self-correcting. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage from a distance. We need a leader who will go deep, get their hands dirty, and drive the technical and operational transformation from the front.

What You Will Need

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who combines technical depth with strong execution instincts. This role requires someone who can earn the trust of a senior engineering team by understanding the system as well as they do — and then leading it to a better place.

• Technical Depth: Must be comfortable going deep into complex systems — reading code, debugging production issues, reviewing architecture, and identifying root causes. Hands-on instinct is essential at this stage of the team's journey.

• Operational Transformation: Experience taking a high-toil, operationally demanding system and driving it toward stability and autonomy. Track record of identifying systemic issues and fixing them, not just managing around them.

• Product & Platform Experience: Hands-on experience building scalable platform systems end-to-end. Comfortable owning both technical architecture and product outcomes.

• Stakeholder Collaboration: Proven ability to work with cross-functional teams — Payroll, Compliance, Finance Engineering, and global stakeholders.

• Execution-Driven: Clear track record of setting roadmaps, defining milestones, and shipping in high-ambiguity environments.

• People Leadership: Minimum 5 years in a managerial role, including 2+ years managing managers, with 7–8 years as an IC prior.

• Domain Affinity: Experience in payroll, tax, fintech, or high-correctness financial systems is strongly preferred.

• Communication: Clear and effective communication, especially across distributed teams and with non-engineering stakeholders.

• Experience Range: Total 12–17 years (IC + Managerial).

What You'll Own

• System Stabilization & Operational Excellence: Take direct ownership of reducing the team's operational burden. Identify root causes of recurring failures, manual workflows, and correctness gaps. Drive systematic fixes — not workarounds — until the engine runs autonomously with minimal human intervention.

• Tax Calculation Engine at Scale: Own and evolve the core engine that computes federal, state, and local taxes across 5,000+ US tax codes for millions of employees — with correctness and sub-SLA latency as non-negotiable constraints.

• AI-Powered Tax Explainability: Lead the effort to use AI to surface granular, human-readable explanations of every tax calculation — breaking down why each dollar was withheld, referencing the underlying rule, rate table, or exemption that drove it.

• Enterprise Scale Performance: Architect the tax computation pipeline to support companies with 50,000+ employees within strict SLAs — solving for parallelism, caching, incremental recomputation, and latency under payroll run pressure.

• Global Tax Expansion: Design and ship the abstractions that allow the tax engine to scale beyond the US into 10+ countries — building a jurisdiction-agnostic calculation framework that accommodates fundamentally different tax models (PAYE, social contributions, withholding tables, multi-tier brackets).

• Country Expansion Enablement: Build the tooling and frameworks that allow Rippling to a new country's tax rules without rewriting the engine — enabling rapid country launches with high confidence in correctness.

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 [email protected].

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees, 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.