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.
Nice to have
• Hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, or ML-assisted ranking experience.
• Experience with analytics/query ecosystems (e.g., Trino/Presto, Kafka, Iceberg, Spark).
• Experience building discoverability products such as catalog search, field selection, metadata ranking.
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.
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 employees role.