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the role You will be the primary technical authority for Search at Rippling, designing cross-platform search primitives that will power the next generation of our product features. You will partner with the Product leadership to influence the roadmap, ensuring Search capabilities are a competitive advantage for our product suite. You will own architecture and execution for indexing, retrieval, relevance/ranking, and query performance at scale. You’ll partner across with Product leadership Data Cloud, platform, and AI/product teams to build shared search primitives that power multiple product surfaces. What you will do Define and lead the technical vision for Rippling search systems: indexing pipelines, query serving, ranking/relevance, and retrieval quality measurement Tackle open-ended challenges in hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, and metadata ranking to push the boundaries of what our platform can do. Build and operate resilient, high-performance infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) capable of supporting 10x scale growth while maintaining rigorous standards for latency, freshness, correctness and cost-efficiency. Define relevance strategy and evaluation: offline benchmarks, quality metrics, and production monitoring. Build reusable search platform abstractions used by multiple Rippling products. Elevate the entire engineering organization through strategic design reviews, mentorship, and the establishment of "best-in-class" operational standards. What you will need 8+ years in backend/platform engineering with ownership of distributed systems in production. Deep experience in search infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene-style systems), indexing, and relevance tuning. Strong systems design fundamentals: storage/index design, query execution, performance optimization, and reliability engineering. Experience with data platforms and schema-rich systems, including large-scale ingestion and serving paths. Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or Java). Strong cross-functional execution and ability to lead ambiguous multi-team platform initiatives.

Rippling is a workforce management system that eliminates the friction from running a business. Today, most companies struggle with everything from routine tasks, like running payroll, to cross-functional planning, like aligning on headcount. That’s because all their data related to people, processes, and systems is scattered in a hundred places.

Rippling has every application you need to run your business—from applicant tracking and payroll to IT and expenses—in one place. But unlike other systems, Rippling sits on top of a unified platform. Data flows dynamically between Rippling’s applications, giving every team a shared source of truth, the power to automate processes, and access to the insights they need. This allows your business to execute better, faster.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.2B from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock.

Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform

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