THE WORK:

Ripple is building the Internet of Value: 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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll set technical direction for that platform. You'll own the architecture of the compliance control plane: the vendor-agnostic, resilient, provable system that lets Ripple move value without moving financial crime, and you'll drive its evolution across Ripple's product lines. This is a role for someone who operates beyond individual services: you'll define the technical strategy others build against, anticipate where the platform needs to go before it's asked, and raise the engineering bar across the team.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• 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, not just today's requirements
• 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: the engineer whose presence makes everyone around them better

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

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

WHY THIS ROLE

• Consequence: your architecture decides whether real payments clear, in real time, for real customers.
• Ownership at the platform level: you're not owning a service, you're shaping the control plane every Ripple product depends on.
• Building the next generation: we're actively designing the vendor-agnostic, resilient compliance platform built to scale across new jurisdictions and product surfaces. This is the person who leads that design.
• Cross-functional weight: you'll work daily with senior leaders across the company. The job is technical, but the influence is organizational.
• Technical leadership without leaving the code: the senior-most IC voice on a team where the engineering genuinely matters.

Other common names for this role:

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

$212,000-$265,000 USD