Senior Engineering Manager - Risk Engineering

About the role

As Rippling expands into a global, multi-product business operating system, payments sit right at the center of our platform. We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, Risk Engineering to lead the end-to-end horizontal financial risk decisioning platform across all Rippling product lines, including Payments, Corporate Card, Payroll, Spend Management, and Onboarding.

This role is responsible for building and operating the central safety and decisioning engine for every dollar moved across the company. The platform handles two core engineering workloads: sub-second real-time decisioning such as during point-of-sale card swipes and payroll risk checks, as well as continuous high-throughput offline batch processing for portfolio credit limit re-evaluations and customer risk scoring.

A primary strategic mandate for this role is leading agentic AI adoption across risk workflows building autonomous AI agents that evaluate complex financial risk profiles and eliminate manual back-office tasks, enabling customer transaction volume to double with zero operations headcount growth.

What you will do

• Unified Risk Architecture: Direct the multi-quarter initiative to route 100% of Rippling's payments through a single, unified risk engine.
• No-Code Platform Engineering: Design and scale an in-house, no-code rule authoring platform that enables non-technical stakeholders in Finance, Risk Operations, and Compliance to author, test, and deploy risk logic independently.
• Agentic AI & Automation: Architect and operationalize AI agents capable of synthesizing fraud signals, evaluating financial risk profiles, and executing automated determinations.
• Team Leadership & Development: Recruit, mentor, and lead a senior-heavy team of Staff and Senior Engineers in San Francisco.
• Global Team Scaling: Establish high-velocity cross-functional operating models as extended international engineering pods report into this organizational scope.

What you will need

• Leadership Experience: Proven track record as an Engineering Manager leading core platform, infrastructure, or risk engineering teams.
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Strong background in balancing low-latency real-time evaluation systems (sub-second SLAs) with large-scale high-throughput offline batch processing.
• Domain Expertise: Experience in financial technology, fraud mitigation, credit risk, or decisioning engine infrastructure.
• AI & Agentic Systems: Demonstrated experience or strong technical strategy around integrating AI models or agentic automation into core operational workflows.
• Senior IC Management: Experience managing high-caliber Staff-level engineers and building multi-region engineering organizations.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ability to partner closely with Product, Finance, and Operations teams against a balanced risk-appetite model.