Product Design Lead

Rippling gives businesses one place to run their HR, IT, and Finance operations. Its platform brings together workforce systems such as payroll, benefits, expenses, identity, devices, and third-party applications, allowing companies to manage and automate an employee's lifecycle from a single system.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Rippling has raised $1.85 billion from investors like Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock, and its platform is used by 30,000 companies globally. It operates across four continents, with offices in Bengaluru, Dublin, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto.

Rippling’s HRIS is the system of record for employee data across the platform. When information about an employee changes, it can affect workflows across HR, payroll, IT, Finance, and more. As the Product Design Lead, you will own the end-to-end design of the HRIS product, turning multilayered enterprise complexity into workflows that are fast, intuitive, and error-proof.

The role demands strong information architecture, systems thinking, and the judgment to make high-stakes design calls independently.

You will report to the Director of Design based in the US and collaborate daily with the HRIS product and engineering team in Bengaluru.

• End-to-end design of the HRIS product. Design core workflows across hiring, employee data, organisational changes, and compliance, making them simple to use by employees and powerful for administrators.
• Information architecture. Define how complex employee data, permissions, workflows, and product relationships are organised. Help users understand where they are, what requires their attention, and how their actions affect other parts of the platform.
• Stakeholder collaboration and design rationale. Work directly with PMs, engineers, and business counterparts; defend design decisions with evidence and trade-off thinking.
• Revamp inherited systems. Improve established workflows that need to support changing customer, product, or regulatory requirements.
• Design quality and craft standards. Set the bar for what good UX looks like on the HRIS team, working within Rippling's established design system.

• You have simplified complex enterprise products. You have owned and simplified the UX of a multi-step, multi-user workflow where tiny errors compound and create exponential damage to existing systems.
• You have strong information architecture instincts. You think in systems first: how flows connect, where users get lost, and how to reduce cognitive load across hundreds of screens.
• You have built for global, multi-segment user bases. You have designed for different user groups, such as administrators, employees, managers, and executives, across multiple markets or compliance environments.
• You have worked in a multi-product platform environment. Your design decisions had upstream and downstream effects on other products and teams, and you were able to navigate that complexity by aligning all the stakeholders involved.
• You have made high-stakes calls independently. You can develop domain expertise quickly, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and own timelines and dependencies with limited oversight.
• You have worked in regulated and data-intensive industries. Experience in HR technology, payroll, financial technology, compliance, identity, or another regulated and data-intensive domain is especially relevant.

• Deep customer empathy. Learn how customers work, including their operational and compliance constraints, before proposing a solution.
• End-to-end ownership. Stay accountable from initial problem definition through shipped product quality and post-launch learning.
• Speed with judgment. Scope and sequence work so the team can move quickly without compromising the reliability required by payroll, employee data, permissions, and compliance workflows.
• Defend your decisions with evidence. Explain recommendations through evidence, constraints, alternatives, and trade-offs rather than personal preference.
• Collaborate in the room. The team works on-site Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The best decisions happen at the whiteboard, not over async threads.
• Hands-on leadership. Lead through the quality of your product thinking and design work while raising the standard for the broader team.

HRIS sits at the center of Rippling’s platform. The experiences designed by this team influence how employee information is created, understood, updated, and used across HR, IT, Finance, payroll, and compliance products.

You will report to the Director of Design and shape foundational workflows used across countries, customer segments, and user types. You will combine the scope of a global platform with substantial hands-on ownership, helping define both the product experience and the design standards for Rippling’s growing team.