Senior Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

Ripple • San Francisco, CA

2d

About The Position

At Ripple, we’re building a world where value moves like information does today. Through our crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments and developers, we are improving the global financial system and creating greater economic fairness and opportunity for more people, in more places around the world. The Financial Crimes Engineering team builds and operates the real-time financial crimes controls layer, which includes sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. This engineering determines whether payments clear or hold, whether Ripple meets its regulatory obligations across jurisdictions, and whether the network can scale without compromising on compliance. The problem space is genuinely hard, involving high-throughput distributed systems, real-time decisioning, multi-source coordination across external compliance data providers, regulator-grade audit trails, and resilience. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on this team, you will set the multi-year technical direction for the compliance control plane and drive its adoption beyond your own team. You will own the architecture of the vendor-agnostic, resilient, provable system that lets Ripple move value without moving financial crime, and you will shape how compliance engineering works across the company. This is a role for someone who defines which problems the organization solves, not only how they get solved: you will set the technical strategy other teams build against, establish the patterns that become organizational standards, and serve as the senior-most engineering voice on how regulatory obligations become durable infrastructure.

Requirements

• 12+ years building production backend systems, with deep expertise in Java (or comparable JVM languages, Go, Rust)
• A track record of owning architecture for complex distributed systems at scale across multiple teams or organizations, defining the designs that others build against and that outlast your involvement
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction at the organizational level and drive adoption of standards and patterns across team boundaries without formal authority
• Strong resilience and distributed-systems design instincts: failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning, and designing systems that survive the failure of dependencies you do not control
• Excellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC) and a history of establishing patterns that become organizational defaults
• Proven skill navigating ambiguity in a regulated environment, turning regulator findings, audit obligations, and partner asks into shippable, durable engineering plans, and defending those decisions to auditors and examiners
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
• A track record of developing senior and staff engineers and measurably lifting the technical bar of an organization

Nice To Haves

• Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology is a strong plus, though exceptional systems architects from adjacent high-stakes domains are welcome

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year architectural vision for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, the resilience and observability layer, vendor-agnostic integration, and the decision and data plane, sequenced against where Ripple's products and regulatory surface will be in three years, not where they are today
• Drive the hardest, highest-ambiguity technical problems end to end: multi-vendor failover, sub-second decisioning under load, regulator-grade auditability, and resilience across partial dependency failures
• Set technical direction that extends beyond FinCrimes: define the integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives that partner engineering teams adopt, and drive alignment across organizational boundaries where no single team owns the outcome
• Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced technical roadmap, and influence what the organization invests in to get there
• Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints years before they become incidents, and lead the initiatives that address them
• Partner directly with executive leadership across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to shape how regulatory requirements become engineering reality, and represent the platform's technical position to auditors, regulators, and external partners
• Set standards for production ownership across the team and beyond: observability, alerting, incident response, and the reliability bar that other teams calibrate against
• Multiply the technical capability of the organization: mentor staff and senior engineers, elevate design quality through architecture review, and raise the ceiling of what the team can take on

Benefits

• Build real world value
• Unlock incredible career growth opportunities
• See your impact
• Grow your skills surrounded by colleagues who have your backs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed