Meet the Ripplers: Saksham Puri

Meet Saksham Puri — a senior software engineer on Rippling’s web design team. With an early start in coding and a natural drive for optimization, Saksham’s road from automating the family business to developing Rippling’s design language is a story of curiosity, speed, and quality. Read more about Saksham and how he shapes how our products look and feel, at scale.

More hacking, more living

I began coding when I was about 12—after exhausting the number of shapes I could make in K-Turtle. I started off with game-dev in Java (still, in my opinion, the best way to understand Object Oriented principles) by literally seeing your virtual objects come to life. Come eleventh grade, I was fluently talking to my computer.

I remember in high school, my mother was running a small franchise-business from home, and she used to spend hours just getting customer data out of her company's legacy ERP software. I automated it for her using Puppeteer. Seeing how a Sunday for me saved her hours of manual work each and every single day, no one raised any flags in me choosing to study Computer Science.

Writing software made me feel powerful. You have the ability to create things just by sitting at a desk — and this power multiplies as you go. I got deep into the “geek” world from building and flashing custom ROMs on my Android to spending weeks learning vim. I was committed to the community. 

Today, I connect tech to real-world problems, finding it amazing how much our solutions across industries are inspired by nature, whether it be object oriented programming or LLMs. Since software is a lot about optimizing — my life revolves around optimizing whatever I can. That said, guitar is my escape from the software world; there’s never a mental blocker that a quick solo of One Last Breath by Creed didn’t unblock.

Building Rippling’s visual foundation

At Rippling, our web design system team drives how our product looks and feels, no matter where you click. Our brand identification is a combination of several design elements like colors, spacings, borders, etc. — and our team systemizes it at scale. We ensure consistency, usability, and speed across every product page within Rippling. It’s a huge part of what makes users feel at home in a product.

When I joined three years ago, Rippling was scaling at an unimaginable speed and the need for a design system was very apparent. We started from nothing and quickly went from having a dated UI to a much more modern look that our customers now know Rippling by. Systemizing a compound app like Rippling came with tons of challenges, and this is where we went from 1 to 100. As a platform team, we affect all of Rippling’s products. Our changes are extremely wide-reaching, which means we tread carefully and cautiously. 

The Rippling way: speed + quality

At the same time, we value pace at Rippling. Our ability to do what we do while moving fast and at scale are what sets us apart. The problems we're solving are increasingly complex. One lesson I’ve learned here is that you can’t be all ‘perfect tech’ or all ‘hurricane‑fast startup.’ You really have to find that sweet spot.

Every mentor or manager I’ve had (shout out Balram and Abey!), showed me how to pick the right solutions, ship fast, then iterate so we can deliver quickly without compromising on what matters. And at Rippling, every IC takes that seriously. You can’t succeed if you need to be spoon-fed.

Future of design at Rippling

The benefit we get from systemizing design in a product is the ability to control and act on it from the platform. As we quickly move to completion of implementing a themeable product, our next goal is to use the power of new age AI tools for bridging the gap from design to production. Having higher level abstractions of UI patterns would allow Rippling product pages to look consistent in any of the products we have today, and the ones that we’ll continue to launch in the future. 

The best part for me has been seeing the progress of what we have built here — the start of a non-existent design system to us now moving in a matured territory, all in a time frame where most companies at the scale of Rippling wouldn’t expect. That, and I get to geek out on optimization while building something everyone uses. Again, I’ve always been a problem-solver and Rippling has some really good problems to solve.