Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

Ripple • San Francisco, CA

19d

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 Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll set technical direction for that platform, own the architecture of the compliance control plane, and drive its evolution across Ripple's product lines. This is a role for someone who operates beyond individual services, defining the technical strategy others build against, anticipating platform needs, and raising the engineering bar across the team.

Requirements

• 8+ 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, not just building within an existing design, but defining the design others build against.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical direction across teams and influence engineering decisions beyond your immediate scope.
• Strong resilience and distributed-systems design instincts: failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning.
• Excellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC) and the ability to establish patterns others adopt.
• Proven skill navigating ambiguity in a regulated environment, turning regulator findings, audit obligations, and partner asks into shippable, durable engineering plans.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• A history of mentoring engineers and lifting the technical bar of a team.

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

• Set architectural direction for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, the resilience and observability layer, vendor-agnostic integration, and the decision/data plane, designing for where the platform needs to be across future jurisdictions and product surfaces.
• 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.
• Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced technical roadmap, with milestones and clear execution plans.
• Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints before they become incidents, and lead the initiatives that address them.
• Partner directly with senior leaders to align complex cross-functional objectives and shape how regulatory requirements become engineering reality.
• Set standards for production ownership: observability, alerting, incident response, and raise the reliability bar for the whole team.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, elevate design quality across the team, and act as a technical multiplier.

What This Job Offers

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