THE WORK:Ripple is building the Internet of Value by building infrastructure that moves money as fast as information moves today. Every payment that flows across our network passes through real-time financial crimes controls: sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. The Financial Crimes Engineering team builds and operates that layer.
This is the engineering that 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: high-throughput distributed systems, real-time decisioning, multi-source coordination across external compliance data providers, regulator-grade audit trails, and resilience requirements measured against critical regulatory frameworks.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you'll own meaningful pieces of that platform, including Java-based compliance orchestration services, the resilience and observability layer that keeps them running through partial dependency failures, and the operator surfaces that let compliance teams make high-stakes decisions in real time.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:- Design and build distributed backend services that orchestrate real-time screening across multiple risk domains, integrating internal Ripple systems with external compliance data providers
- Architect for resilience to keep payments flowing even when upstream dependencies degrade
- Build the decision and data plane that powers compliance operations: alerting, audit trails, case management workflows, investigator tooling
- Own production: define observability, alerting, and incident response
- Partner with Compliance, Global Investigations, and Product to translate evolving regulatory requirements into durable engineering primitives
- Mentor engineers across the team and contribute to architectural direction as the platform scales across Ripple's product line
WHAT YOU'LL BRING:- 5+ years building production backend systems in Java (or comparable JVM languages, Go, Rust)
- Strong API design instincts (REST/gRPC)
- Experience with distributed systems patterns
- Demonstrated comfort with resilience design
- Ability to navigate ambiguity in a regulated environment, turning external requirements (regulator findings, audit obligations, partner asks) into shippable engineering plans
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
- Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology is a plus, but not required if you bring strong systems instincts
WHY THIS ROLE- Consequence: your code decides whether real payments clear, in real time, for real customers.
- Complexity: multi-source coordination, sub-second decisioning, regulator-grade auditability, and resilience across the full compliance surface area.
- Breadth: our platform touches every Ripple product line.
- Building, not just maintaining: we're actively designing the next generation of this platform, built to scale across new jurisdictions and product surfaces.
- Cross-functional weight: you'll work daily with cross functional teams across the company. The job is technical, but the context is significantly wider than the code.
#LI-DNI
For positions that will be based in CA, the annual salary range for this position is below. Actual salaries may vary based on numerous factors including, among other things, an individual applicant's experience and qualifications for the position. This range does not include equity or additional compensation, such as bonuses or commissions.
CA Annual Base Salary Range$168,000-$210,000 USD
