Director of Engineering, Infrastructure
About The Position
Every payment, custody operation, and line of code at Ripple runs on the infrastructure our platform teams build. We operate a multi-cloud, Kubernetes-native environment spanning multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions, engineered for the availability and security standards our financial institution customers expect — and for the developer velocity our engineers need. The systems this organization owns are the substrate for everything Ripple ships. We have a big vision and the ambition to match. We are seeking the same in engineering leaders. You see infrastructure not as plumbing but as leverage: the difference between an engineering organization that ships weekly and one that ships continuously, between a platform that survives a regional outage and one that doesn't notice it happened. We're looking for a hands-on engineering leader to develop and guide the teams responsible for Ripple's cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience.
Requirements
- 12+ years of hands-on software and infrastructure engineering experience, including 5+ years leading teams and managing managers
- Deep, production-grade experience with Kubernetes at scale — multi-cluster and multi-tenant operations, upgrade strategy, workload isolation, autoscaling, and the failure modes you only learn about the hard way
- Experience operating across more than one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear point of view on where multi-cloud pays for itself and where it doesn't
- Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and declarative operations (Terraform, Helm, GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux)
- Track record building highly available, secure distributed systems and the observability to run them (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting that people actually trust)
- Experience with service networking and service mesh technologies, and with securing traffic and identity across cloud boundaries
- Demonstrated ability to improve developer experience measurably — build and deploy times, environment provisioning, self-service platform capabilities
- Experience partnering with security and regulatory oversight functions in a regulated environment; comfort with least-privilege, key management, and audit requirements
- Experience with Agile development, with a focus on robust design, scalability, and security
- Solid leadership and communication skills, with the judgment to know when to decide, when to delegate, and when to dig in yourself
- Eagerness to work openly and collaboratively with a diverse team, with a positive attitude and a passion for sharing knowledge
- BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science or similar
Nice To Haves
- experience in FinTech, payments, or crypto infrastructure
- familiarity with blockchain node operations
- exposure to hardware security modules or high-assurance key management systems
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical and organizational strategy managing multi-cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform at Ripple, balancing reliability, security, cost, and developer velocity
- Lead multiple teams and managers across compute platform, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and reliability engineering
- Define and deliver the multi-year infrastructure roadmap, including cluster architecture, workload orchestration, service networking, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD
- Set the standard for operational excellence — SLOs, incident response, on-call health, blameless postmortems, and dynamic rollout practices — and hold the organization to it
- Drive multi-cloud strategy and execution: workload placement, portability, avoiding accidental lock-in, disaster recovery, and multi-region resilience
- Partner with Security and Compliance to build infrastructure that satisfies SOC 2, ISO 27001, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements without slowing engineering down
- Own cloud spend for your organization, with clear accountability for efficiency and unit economics as the platform scales
- Provide hands-on technical leadership — architecture reviews, design docs, incident escalations, and the occasional pull request
- Mentor and grow the professional and technical development of your team, both managers and individual contributors
- Establish team objectives and quarterly plans in alignment with business and organizational goals
- Translate infrastructure investments into terms that resonate with engineers, product leaders, and executives alike
- Scale the organization by attracting, hiring, and developing exceptional leaders and engineers at all levels
Benefits
- Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity
- Competitive benefits that cover physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
- Employee giving match
- Mobile phone stipend
- R&R days so you can rest and recharge
- Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
- Generous vacation policy - work with your manager to take time off when you need it
- Industry-leading parental leave policies
- Family planning benefits
- Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages, and plenty of fun events
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
Associate degree
