Hackweek 2025: one global team, building together

Hackweek is a critical part of how Rippling builds. Over five days, engineers, designers, product managers, and non-technical teammates pause their daily routines to focus on new projects  that have the potential to shape Rippling’s future.

This year’s theme was Go Global, with Ripplers from India, US, UK, Canada, China, and the UAE collaborating on ideas. The goal was to develop features, tools, and processes that could be scaled internationally.

Designed to Ship

Hackweek at Rippling isn’t just about brainstorming. Employees get dedicated time during their work days to focus all their energy on building. Projects are built with impact in mind, and many ship into production. 

Ripplers choose the projects that matter most to them. This could be a new feature, a process improvement, or the beginnings of a new product that can be scaled internationally. 

This year, Ripplers submitted 254 project ideas, which was a 150% increase from 2024. Half of all Hackweek participation came from the Rippling India team (the company’s largest office), with the remaining participants spread across the US, Canada, UK, China, and UAE.

During the event, it was the on-the-ground energy that stood out most to Whitney Powers, who has led the Hackweek committee for the past three years. 

“What stood out was the energy. The creativity and polish blew me away, and it was amazing to see that same excitement echoed by leadership, judges, and teams across the organisation,” Powers said.

Highlights from Hackweek 2025

The Ripplers’ Hackweek projects spanned every part of Rippling’s platform. “This Hackweek showed us what it means to build with AI as a true teammate. 115 teams adopted AI as a core part of their projects, with many reaching working demos across product automation and internal tools that cut the grunt work. AI enabled engineers, designers, and business teams to collaborate in new ways, moving faster from idea to execution. That’s the promise of Hackweek, experimenting boldly and discovering how we can work better together,” said Ankur Bhatt, Director of Engineering. While there were plenty of great contenders, there were some clear standouts. Here are the winners.

Personalised Onboarding & Quality of Hire

Team: Luke Prokopiak, Matt Viane, Eleanor Hofstedt, Rohit Kumar, Jonathan Low, Max Presman, Adelaide Wang, Edwin Lai, Richard Lee

The challenge: The products in the Talent Suite were too disconnected from one another—and from the rest of Rippling. The team created a solution so that information gathered in each product could be used to improve the entire Rippling experience.

The solution and impact: The project auto-generates personalised onboarding plans from job descriptions and interview feedback, with integrated 1:1s and goals.  Then, at 90 days, managers provide review cycle feedback that powers Quality of Hire dashboards in Recruiting. This closes the loop across the Talent Suite, improves new-hire ramp, and gives talent teams visibility into hiring success.

Book My Desk

Team: Prawar Narang, Mariam Abraham, Aditya Gupta, Yash Agrawal, Rachit Parwanda

The challenge: Hybrid work makes managing office space difficult. Employees lack visibility, and admins struggle with control and optimisation.

The solution and impact: Rippling’s Workplace Management App lets admins upload blueprints, configure desks, set access rules, and manage layouts. Employees can view live office maps, book desks for certain dates and times, and view nearby colleagues, while admins have bulk editing and booking restrictions for full control. This foundation will expand to meeting rooms, visitor management, and AI-driven workspace optimisation, making Rippling the single hub for workforce and workspace management.

Sentiment Analysis in Surveys

Team: Jesse Ling, Rani Horev, Annie Liu, Eleanor Su

The challenge: Launching a survey at scale makes it unrealistic to read through each response individually, which could result in overlooked nuance or missed sentiments. The team found a way to summarise and extract user sentiment in a format that was easy to read.

The solution and impact: By integrating Rippling’s surveys product with its existing LLM infrastructure, the team used an LLM to classify each response into a range of user sentiments and enable AI-driven summarisation of survey responses, making surveys more valuable

FX Margin Optimisation

Team: Raj Sistla, Shridhar Ramachandran, Wayne Huang

The challenge: Foreign exchange (FX) rates can be complicated when you’re managing payroll on a global scale. These Ripplers wanted to optimize FX rates in a way that would benefit customers and improve Rippling’s bottom line without taking on undue FX risk.

The solution and impact: The team built a framework to dynamically calculate FX margins based on the provider and prevailing FX rates, replacing the previous static model. This approach delivers better FX rates for customers while boosting Rippling’s FX margin revenue. By shortening FX settlement times, the team also reduced spreads paid to providers on volatile currencies.

Reports Responsive Views

Team: Kartikay Sapra

Challenge: More detailed reporting is always valuable, and some of our Ripplers noticed an opportunity. He wanted to enhance the reports experience by minimizing perceived latency, offering personalization, enabling data comparison, and improving overall product quality.

The solution and impact: The project introduced nine fast and reliable client-side features: 

• Data comparison (row vs row, column vs column, cell vs cell, past vs present table)

• Focused view

• Masked view

• Fullscreen view

• Column freezing

• Null placeholders

• Row numbering

• Data density,

• Links to individual cells in a report.

The potential impact is improved user engagement and a smoother transition from other BI tools to Rippling Data Cloud products.

AI-Enhanced Transformations Dev Flow

Team: Spandan Bemby, Hemant Kumar, Vishnu Bhyravajosyula

Challenge: Writing analytic SQL queries for the Rippling Transformations platform had several  points of friction, including finding the right datasets and determining dialect-specific syntax. This impacted the customer experience and feature adoption. 

The solution and impact: The team built a co-pilot to simplify the UX of developing Transformations. The co-pilot can find datasets based on user intent, answer syntax-specific questions, and generate SQL. It’s  projected to improve the usability and self-serviceability of the product, increase developer velocity, and reduce the number of questions handled by the on-call team.

The Ripple Effect

Hackweek doesn’t end when the event is over. Plenty of projects from last year are already in production, improving Rippling’s products and the customer experience, and we’re already excited about developing some of the projects from 2025’s winners

“The Post Install Engagement doubled recruiting engagement, with one hire made directly through Rippling Recruiting, and also inspired other teams to rethink their onboarding experience,” says Chan Kim, a Hackweek 2024 winner.

“Quick Flows–inspired projects deliver significant UX improvements. For example, Fast Flows cut the number of pages in Hiring from 20 to 10, while also substantially reducing the time required to hire an individual,” says Ravi Singh, another 2024 winner.

Hackweek 2025 once again showed how Ripplers across the globe can push the limits of what’s possible together.