Senior Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes
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 Senior Staff Software Engineer on this team, you will set the multi-year technical direction for the compliance control plane and drive its adoption beyond your own team. You will own the architecture of the vendor-agnostic, resilient, provable system that lets Ripple move value without moving financial crime, and you will shape how compliance engineering works across the company. This is a role for someone who defines which problems the organization solves, not only how they get solved: you will set the technical strategy other teams build against, establish the patterns that become organizational standards, and serve as the senior-most engineering voice on how regulatory obligations become durable infrastructure.
WHAT YOU’LL DO:
Own the multi-year architectural vision for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, the resilience and observability layer, vendor-agnostic integration, and the decision and data plane, sequenced against where Ripple's products and regulatory surface will be in three years, not where they are today
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
Set technical direction that extends beyond FinCrimes: define the integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives that partner engineering teams adopt, and drive alignment across organizational boundaries where no single team owns the outcome
Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced technical roadmap, and influence what the organization invests in to get there
Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints years before they become incidents, and lead the initiatives that address them
Partner directly with executive leadership across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to shape how regulatory requirements become engineering reality, and represent the platform's technical position to auditors, regulators, and external partners
Set standards for production ownership across the team and beyond: observability, alerting, incident response, and the reliability bar that other teams calibrate against
Multiply the technical capability of the organization: mentor staff and senior engineers, elevate design quality through architecture review, and raise the ceiling of what the team can take on
WHAT YOU'LL BRING:
12+ 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 across multiple teams or organizations, defining the designs that others build against and that outlast your involvement
Demonstrated ability to set technical direction at the organizational level and drive adoption of standards and patterns across team boundaries without formal authority
Strong resilience and distributed-systems design instincts: failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning, and designing systems that survive the failure of dependencies you do not control
Excellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC) and a history of establishing patterns that become organizational defaults
Proven skill navigating ambiguity in a regulated environment, turning regulator findings, audit obligations, and partner asks into shippable, durable engineering plans, and defending those decisions to auditors and examiners
Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
A track record of developing senior and staff engineers and measurably lifting the technical bar of an organization
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 beyond the platform: you are not owning a service or even a system, you are shaping the compliance control plane that every Ripple product depends on and the standards that partner teams build to.
Building the next generation: we are 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 and sets its direction for the next several years.
Executive-level influence: you will work directly with senior leaders across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product. 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
$236,000—$295,000 USD