The central insight behind Rippling is that employee data is way more distributed than most people realize. That disconnectedness is the root cause of countless administrative problems. We’ve created a unified data model that combines employee data, as well as data from other business applications. We call this Rippling’s Employee Graph. Everything we build sits on top of it.

Directly above the Employee Graph is Rippling’s middleware. It’s a powerful set of core capabilities, including workflow automation, analytics, permissions, and policies. These components sit inside every product we build, and their functionality can be reconfigured to address a wide array of problems. With this foundation in place, we skip building the most primitive parts of each product over and over.

Since we’re not building from scratch, our engineers can focus on the most interesting—and challenging—parts of their particular product. They spend their time understanding the business processes, decision-making, and workflows specific to what they’re building and determining which abstractions are right for supporting its most complex use cases. That allows us to ship better products faster.