Rippling needs to design a unified permissions framework that powers access control across its ecosystem, ensuring safety, clarity, and a coherent model of permissions for all products.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience designing permissions/access control/identity (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, entitlements, policy engines) or similarly complex systems—and the ability to model them so others can reason about and build against them.
- Proven ability to think in systems and simplify complexity without losing nuance, with experience in challenging domains or compliance‑heavy environments.
- A strong eye for visual and interaction craft, with the ability to produce clear, detailed specifications and contribute to the development of our design system.
- 8+ years of end‑to‑end product design experience, with a portfolio of complex, high‑impact platform work delivered from initial concept through iteration and delivery.
- Exceptional communication and storytelling skills; you make the abstract concrete with diagrams, narratives, and walkthroughs that align executives, engineers, and GTM partners.
- Relentless customer focus, backed by a habit of digging into real behavior, identifying pain points, and designing solutions that solve meaningful problems.
- A bias toward action, especially in ambiguous or fast‑moving environments—you generate many ideas, iterate quickly, unblock dependencies, and own timelines without daily oversight.
Responsibilities
- Design the end‑to‑end permissions system for Rippling—roles, groups, org‑aware policies, fine‑grained entitlements, approvals/elevation, delegation, and auditability—across both admin and end‑user surfaces.
- Build reusable capabilities and platform primitives—policy builder UIs, default role templates, an entitlement catalog, “why/why not” explainability, and simulation tools—that scale across Rippling’s product offerings and ensure coherent patterns platform‑wide.
- Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Security/Identity, and GTM to scope, prototype, and ship new functionality—unblocking dependencies, writing crisp RFCs and system diagrams, and negotiating trade‑offs along the way.
- Get close to customers, administrators, and internal product teams; study how access is granted and managed today; map mental models and failure points; and translate insights into clear, scalable design priorities that drive real business impact.
- Craft platform primitives that let product teams plug seamlessly into a shared system, while also building customer‑facing experiences that are polished, adaptive, and clear.
- Lead the design of a unified permissions framework that powers access control across Rippling.
- Reduce friction, prevent policy drift, and deliver a coherent, trustworthy model of permissions across the platform.
Other
- This is a role for a designer who thrives on complexity and scale—you have to love the complexity.
- You’ll work closely with product and engineering peers who move quickly, and you'll join a design org that values autonomy, depth, and impact.
- Success here is measured not just in pixels shipped, but in safety, clarity, and the quality of the foundation you lay for every product Rippling offers.
- If you’ve led design for permissions, identity and access management, admin platforms, or other platform‑scale B2B products—and you’re excited to own a capability that influences nearly every experience in the product—we’d love to talk.
- 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.
