Meet the Ripplers: Michael Bitzos

Meet Michael

Meet Michael Bitzos, a Staff Engineer on the Core Platform team, who’s turned his innate curiosity into an everyday mission at Rippling. Once focused on purely the technical side of engineering, Michael has grown as a business-minded leader helping launch Rippling’s new App Studio. Learn how he’s discovered that ownership, collaboration, and a fast pace are what make working at Rippling worthwhile.

Technical with a business sense

I grew up in Canada and eventually made my way to California to immerse myself in tech. By nature, I’ve always been a nerd, constantly curious across multiple domains — game development, D&D, anime. Engineering was kind of inevitable.

When I first joined Rippling earlier in my career, I was very much solely focused on developing my technical skills. My whole world was how do I build this? Pretty quickly, I’ve become more of a product engineer, even if I’m on the Platform team where I’ve learned more about what and why we build.

I think there’s this common misconception that the best engineers are only the ones who are deeply technical specialists in complex domains. At Rippling, the best engineers I’ve ever worked with are a perfect blend of highly technical individuals with extremely strong business sense.

Being surrounded by peers who know the business and constantly solve customer use cases makes Rippling an incredible incubator. You don’t succeed in building in a vacuum. This type of environment provides you with a broad view of the business, and that outlook has been extremely valuable.

No rigid boundaries

In my three years, I’ve been thrown into high-priority projects that I’ve had to deliver in short amounts of time. Those projects have pushed me in the best ways, forcing me to grow quickly as both an engineer and a collaborator.

I’ve also been able to pursue projects on my own, which, I think, is a uniquely Rippling environment. If you see a problem, you’re encouraged to go for it and you can do so because of the open culture.

For example, the work I’m currently focused on now — re-architecting what it means to build products and use the platform at Rippling — requires me to dig into other people’s code, understand their use cases, and offer ready-made solutions. It’s a highly collaborative role that would not be possible without excitement from both parties. Whether it's from a product team wanting to utilize a set of capabilities, or a platform team pushing for more adoption, the drive for business-level success far outweighs the goals of individuals here.

It’s a perfect example of how working at Rippling isn’t siloed. If you want to solve something, people will back you up — even if it means rewriting a piece of their code.

Moving at Rippling speed

Beyond the collaboration, Rippling’s pace stands out. One of my most memorable moments was the first time we demoed off-canvas — our drag-and-drop page builder platform for App Studio. I had spent a night writing this caffeine-fueled vision doc, and within two weeks we had a working prototype ready to fuel a very exciting demo for our execs. Four months later, it was in GA. 

Looking back, it feels like it all happened in a year because of how intense and exciting the process was, but that’s the pace at Rippling. You can go from an idea on paper to a feature in customers’ hands faster than you think.

Inspired by the ecosystem

I actually love what I do. Maybe a little too much. There’s this diverse cast of characters at Rippling — people who’ve founded startups, experts from giant companies, and everything in between. Working with that mix has pushed me to grow in ways I never expected. Everyone’s ambitious, but also collaborative. The energy here is tangibly exciting and makes you constantly want to push the limits of possible for  yourself.

Yes, Rippling goes after founders, but even if you’re not one, it’s about finding people that want to own something. I wake up almost every day with excitement to work on what I do because I feel like it’s my thing.

If you’re looking into Rippling careers, here’s my take: the bar is high and the pace is fast. But if you truly believe in what you want to do, this is an environment that will give you every resource to do it.