Product Lead, Payroll

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA

Department: Product Management

About the role

Rippling is looking for a senior Product Lead to own the core experience for Payroll, one of the most important systems in our platform.

Payroll sits at the intersection of HR, Finance, Benefits, Time, Compliance, and money movement, and it must operate with exceptional correctness, trust, auditability, and reliability. As Rippling scales from SMB into larger and more operationally complex enterprise customers, the Payroll experience must evolve to support deeper configurability, stronger controls, richer workflows, and more edge cases — without losing the simplicity and speed that make Rippling distinct.

This is a senior product lead role focused on building out the Payroll application experience, including agentic payroll capabilities embedded into the product. We are looking for someone who can become a domain expert in technically complex infrastructure, prototype and lead UX work on top of it, and think through how Payroll experiences need to change as users increasingly interact with software through agents.

This is not a narrow feature PM role, a UX facelift role, or a marketing experimentation role. The right person will own meaningful product decisions for a core business-critical product, including what makes it onto the roadmap, what does not, and how to make complex workflows feel simple for customers.

What you will do

• Own the core Payroll application experience and help define how it scales from SMB into enterprise customers. - Build deep expertise in payroll workflows, operational complexity, compliance needs, permissions, approvals, exceptions, and data dependencies.
• Shape roadmap decisions for one of Rippling’s most important product areas, including making difficult tradeoffs when competing priorities cannot all be funded.
• Partner closely with Engineering and Design to simplify complex payroll workflows into intuitive, high-quality product experiences.
• Translate traditional payroll capabilities into agentic workflows that are correct, trustworthy, explainable, and auditable.
• Prototype, critique, and lead UX direction for complex workflows in partnership with design and engineering. - Work directly with customers across need discovery, product walkthroughs, and higher-pressure situations such as escalations or de-escalations.
• Balance SMB simplicity with upmarket requirements for configurability, controls, audibility, and edge-case handling.
• Use data, customer insight, experimentation, and product judgment to build a defensible prioritization rationale.
• Operate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing, Sales, Account Management, Support, Compliance, and senior leadership.

What you will need

• 8+ years of product management or product lead experience.
• Experience operating at Principal, Lead, Staff, Senior Staff, Group PM, or equivalent senior scope.
• A track record of shipping meaningful changes to core products, not just peripheral experiences, marketing pages, onboarding experiments, or cosmetic redesigns.
• Strong product and UX judgment, with the ability to prototype, critique, and lead UX direction for complex workflows.
• Experience building for enterprise, upmarket, or operationally complex B2B customers.
• Strong systems thinking across workflows, states, permissions, approvals, exceptions, data dependencies, and operational trust.
• AI fluency, including an understanding of AI usage patterns, reasoning models, agents, AI product behavior, automation, and AI-mediated workflows.
• Analytical and experimentation fluency, including the ability to define metrics, work with data, run experiments, and build clear prioritization rationale.
• Strong communication and structured thinking; you can make ambiguous problems clear and align cross-functional teams.
• High ownership and execution orientation; you can move from strategy to shipped product.
• Comfort operating as an individual contributor. Prior people-management experience is fine, but this is not a people-manager role.
• Ability to thrive in high-velocity, ambiguous, startup-like environments.

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 accommodations@rippling.com

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 employee's role.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.

About the Company

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one 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.

Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

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