Senior Staff Software Engineer - AI Platform

Qualifications

• 14+ years of software engineering experience , depending on quality of scope and impact.
• Strong backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or systems engineering foundation.
• Deep hands-on coding ability; must be able to design, review, debug, and write code regularly.
• Strong programming knowledge in one or more languages such as Python, Java, Go/Golang, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C# .
• Proven experience owning broad, ambiguous technical charters across multiple systems or teams.
• Strong architecture and system design depth across large-scale production systems.
• Strong technical judgment across scale, reliability, latency, observability, APIs, data modeling, concurrency, and production operations.
• Ability to influence and lead without formal authority while staying close to implementation.
• High intellectual horsepower, fast learning ability, and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• Strong product/platform judgment and ability to connect technical decisions to business and customer impact.
• Ability to mentor and elevate engineers across levels.
• AI/ML background is a strong plus, but not mandatory; practical exposure or strong adjacent experience in AI platform infrastructure, agents, evals, ML/data infra, model infrastructure, inference, sandboxing, workflow automation, scaling, latency, or reliability is highly valuable.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience building AI platform infrastructure, eval frameworks, harness systems, LLM tooling, model-quality systems, or ML/data infrastructure.
• Experience with sandboxing, inference systems, scaling, latency optimization, reliability engineering, or large-scale distributed platforms.
• Strong Python and SQL knowledge.
• Experience with Go, Java, C++, or Scala in backend, infra, platform, or distributed systems environments.
• Experience building internal platforms used by multiple product teams.
• Prior experience in high-growth / hyper-growth startups or fast-moving product-led technology companies.
• Exposure to enterprise SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, Data Cloud, or workflow-heavy platforms.
• Ability to operate as a builder-leader: someone who can define direction, align stakeholders, and still build.

Why Rippling

Additional Information