Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes - Ripple
About The Position
Ripple is building the Internet of Value, and the Financial Crimes Engineering team is responsible for the real-time financial crimes controls that ensure every payment flowing across the network is compliant. This includes sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. The engineering work is critical for determining payment clearance, meeting regulatory obligations, and scaling the network securely. The role involves tackling complex challenges in high-throughput distributed systems, real-time decisioning, multi-source data coordination, and audit trails. The Senior Staff Software Engineer will define the multi-year technical direction for the compliance control plane, drive its adoption across the company, and own the architecture of a resilient, vendor-agnostic system that prevents financial crime. This position requires setting technical strategy, establishing organizational standards, and serving as a senior engineering voice for regulatory compliance infrastructure.
Requirements
- 12+ years building production backend systems.
- 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.
- 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, designing systems that survive dependency failures).
- Excellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC) and a history of establishing organizational default patterns.
- Proven skill navigating ambiguity in a regulated environment, translating findings and requirements into shippable engineering plans, and defending those decisions to auditors.
- 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.
- Exceptional systems architects from adjacent high-stakes domains.
Responsibilities
- Own the multi-year architectural vision for the compliance control plane, including real-time screening orchestration, resilience and observability, vendor-agnostic integration, and the decision and data plane, aligned with future product and regulatory needs.
- Drive complex, high-ambiguity technical problems end-to-end, such as multi-vendor failover, sub-second real-time decisioning under load, regulator-grade auditability, and resilience against partial dependency failures.
- Set technical direction that extends beyond the Financial Crimes team, defining integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives for partner engineering teams, and driving cross-organizational alignment.
- Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into a durable engineering roadmap and influence organizational investment priorities.
- Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints years in advance and lead initiatives to address them.
- Partner directly with executive leadership in Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to translate regulatory requirements into engineering reality and represent the platform's technical position to external stakeholders.
- Set standards for production ownership, including observability, alerting, incident response, and reliability, for the team and beyond.
- Multiply the technical capability of the organization by mentoring senior engineers, elevating design quality through architecture reviews, and increasing the team's capacity.
Benefits
- Professional development budget
- 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
- Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
- Generous vacation policy
- Industry-leading parental leave policies
- Family planning benefits
- Catered lunches
- Fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages
- 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
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
