Product Design Lead

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 $1.85B+ 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.

As Product Design Lead at Rippling, you will own the end-to-end design of the HRIS product, the system of record that underpins every other product on the platform.

You will work directly with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders to translate multi-layered 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. Own the design of the employee graph and its surfaces, from information architecture through shipped screens.
• Information architecture for complex workflows. Map multi-step, multi-user flows across payroll, permissions, and employee data, making them fast and error-proof for every user type.
• Stakeholder collaboration and design rationale. Work directly with PMs, engineers, and business counterparts; defend design decisions with evidence and trade-off thinking.
• Redesign of inherited systems. Take ownership of existing product surfaces that need to be rethought and rebuilt to meet current product and customer demands.
• 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.

• Simplified genuinely complex enterprise products. You have owned the UX of a multi-step, multi-user workflow where errors carry real consequences.
• 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.
• Built for global, multi-segment user bases. You have designed for products used by administrators, end users, and executives simultaneously, across different geographies or compliance contexts.
• Worked in a multi-product platform environment. Your design decisions had upstream and downstream effects on other products or teams, and you navigated that complexity.
• Made high-stakes calls independently. You operated with minimal hand-holding, resolved ambiguity through research and reasoning, and shipped without waiting to be unblocked.
• Brought domain depth to the work. You come from a company where the product complexity was the job: payroll, fintech, HR tech, or a similarly regulated, multi-market platform.
• Showed the work, not just the title. Your portfolio carries the decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes, not just polished final screens.

• Go deep before you propose. Understand the user, the compliance context, and the upstream dependencies before you open a design file.
• Own the problem end to end. From the first whiteboard session to the shipped screen, the design is yours. There is no one waiting to rescue a stalled decision.
• Move fast and get it right. Speed and quality are both expected here. The product touches payroll and compliance; errors have real costs for real customers.
• Defend your decisions with evidence. Good design at Rippling is a reasoned argument, not a preference. Bring the research, the trade-off thinking, and the data.
• Collaborate in the room. The team works on-site Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The best decisions happen at the whiteboard, not over async threads.
• Stay hands-on at every level. Seniority here is demonstrated through the quality of the work, not the distance from it.

You report to the Director of Design and own the design mandate for one of Rippling's most foundational product teams. The role is a ground-floor opportunity on a design team that is being built from a small base into a full-scale function.