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Ripple is building infrastructure for the Internet of Value—a network that moves money as fast as information moves today. Every payment flowing through Ripple's network passes through real-time financial crimes controls: sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. The Financial Crimes Engineering team owns this critical layer.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will set the multi-year technical direction for the compliance control plane and drive adoption across the organization. You own the architecture of a vendor-agnostic, resilient, provable system that enables Ripple to move value without moving financial crime. You shape how compliance engineering works company-wide—defining which problems the organization solves, not just how they get solved.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the multi-year architectural vision for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, resilience and observability layers, vendor-agnostic integration, and decision/data planes sequenced against Ripple's three-year product and regulatory roadmap
- Drive the hardest 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 extending beyond Financial Crimes: define integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives that partner teams adopt; drive alignment across organizational boundaries
- Translate evolving regulatory obligations into durable engineering primitives and sequenced technical roadmaps; influence organizational investment priorities
- Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints years ahead; lead initiatives to address them
- Partner directly with executive leadership across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to translate regulatory requirements into engineering reality; represent the platform's technical position to auditors, regulators, and external partners
- Set production ownership standards across the team: observability, alerting, incident response, and reliability benchmarks
- Mentor staff and senior engineers; elevate design quality through architecture review; raise the team's technical ceiling
You bring 12+ years building production backend systems with deep expertise in Java, Go, or Rust. You have a proven track record owning architecture for complex distributed systems at scale, defining designs that others build against. You can set technical direction at the organizational level and drive adoption of standards across team boundaries without formal authority. You have strong resilience and distributed-systems design instincts: failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning, and designing systems that survive dependency failures outside your control. You excel at API design (REST/gRPC) and establishing patterns that become organizational defaults. You navigate ambiguity in regulated environments, turning regulator findings, audit obligations, and partner asks into durable engineering plans. You have working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
