Ripple

Staff Software Engineer

Ripple • $212K — $265K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Deep backend engineering experience in modern, cloud-native, distributed systems.
  • Exposure to frontend frameworks for full-stack capability.
  • Proven track record designing and delivering large-scale systems.
  • Strong API design and integration skills (REST and/or gRPC).
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS).
  • Comfort with navigating and reducing technical debt while delivering business value.
  • Leadership skills to set technical direction and mentor others.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the design and development of distributed, cloud-native backend services for onboarding.
  • Partner with Product, Compliance, and engineering teams to design scalable orchestration and data pipelines.
  • Migrate core onboarding logic from Salesforce into resilient services.
  • Build platform capabilities that facilitate faster onboarding with fewer customer touchpoints.
  • Contribute to foundational data modeling for Ripple's future identity platform.
  • Champion engineering excellence in code quality and operational practices.
  • Mentor engineers to grow a high-impact team.

Benefits

  • Impact: Work on systems that will be used across all Ripple products, influencing new customer experiences.
  • Technical Challenge: Lead significant migration and design projects.
  • Growth: Shape a horizontal platform team from the ground up.
  • Collaboration: Partner with motivated colleagues in various fields such as engineering, product, and compliance.
Full Job Description
THE WORK:

At Ripple, the Customer Onboarding Platform is where every customer's journey begins - and it's about to get a full-scale rebuild.

We recently became a horizontal platform team serving all Ripple products. Our next chapter:
  • Unwinding years of Salesforce-bound logic into modern, engineering-owned backend services.
  • Integrating best-in-class vendors like Persona for KYC/KYB, while building the surrounding orchestration, data flows, and service layer.
  • Designing the systems and data model that will make onboarding scalable, observable, and reliable across products.

If you're a Staff-level engineer who thrives on modernizing fragile systems, building robust services around vendor integrations, and driving architecture at company-wide scale, this is your opportunity.
Why This Role Matters:

Onboarding is where customers form their first impression of Ripple, and where trust is earned. As the technical anchor for a small, high-impact team, you will:
  • Build for impact - Everything you create will serve multiple Ripple products, from Payments to Custody to Stablecoin.
  • Start from zero - Design and build new backend services from the ground up to power onboarding across products.
  • Tackle the hard stuff - Unwind years of technical debt while designing systems built to last.
  • Shape Ripple's architecture - Partner with Product, Compliance, and Engineering to influence company-wide technical direction.
  • Scale the right way - Mentor engineers and grow a high-performing team, with direct executive backing.

This isn't just about writing code, it's about designing how Ripple's onboarding platform will work for years to come.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:
  • Lead the design and development of distributed, cloud-native backend services that power onboarding across Ripple's product suite.
  • Partner with Product, Compliance, and other engineering teams to design scalable orchestration and data pipelines.
  • Migrate core onboarding logic out of Salesforce into resilient, observable services and a dedicated persistence layer.
  • Build platform capabilities that enable faster onboarding with fewer customer touchpoints - while preserving trust and compliance.
  • Contribute to foundational data modeling work that will feed into Ripple's future identity platform (while ownership of Identity will move to a dedicated team).
  • Champion engineering excellence in code quality, testing, and operational practices.
  • Mentor engineers and help grow a lean, high-impact team.


WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

Required
  • Deep backend engineering experience in modern, cloud-native, distributed systems.
  • Exposure and willingness to frontend frameworks (React, Vue, etc.) for full-stack capability.
  • Proven track record designing and delivering large-scale systems in complex environments.
  • Strong API design and integration skills (REST and/or gRPC).
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS).
  • Comfort navigating and reducing technical debt while delivering business value.
  • Leadership skills: can set technical direction, mentor others, and influence cross-team decisions.
Preferred (But Not Required)
  • Experience with our current stack: Java + Spring Boot.
    • We welcome candidates from other backend stacks (Go, Kotlin, C#, Python, Rust, etc.) who can quickly learn JVM technologies.
  • Event-driven architecture (Kafka, SNS/SQS, etc.).
  • Domain knowledge in fintech, regtech, KYC/KYB, identity verification, or compliance-heavy systems.
Why You'll Love Working Here:
  • Impact: The systems you build will be used across all Ripple products, touching every new customer.
  • Technical Challenge: You'll lead a high-leverage migration and design work that matters.
  • Growth: Opportunity to shape a horizontal platform team from the ground up.
  • Collaboration: Partner with sharp, motivated colleagues across engineering, product, and compliance.

If you want to help replace a fragile, business-critical system with a scalable platform that will serve every Ripple customer for years to come, we'd love to talk.

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

About Ripple

Ripple is a technology company that provides solutions for global payments. The company's main product is the Ripple payment protocol and its associated digital currency XRP. Ripple's payment protocol is designed to enable secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks. Ripple's customers include banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges and corporates. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Ripple
Size
500 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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