Director of Engineering, Infrastructure

At Ripple, you lead the technical and organizational strategy for the infrastructure that powers every payment, custody operation, and line of code shipped by the company. As Director of Engineering, Infrastructure, you guide multiple teams and managers responsible for Ripple's multi-cloud, Kubernetes-native environment spanning multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions. You see infrastructure as leverage: the difference between an engineering organization that ships weekly and one that ships continuously, between a platform that survives a regional outage and one that doesn't notice it happened.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical and organizational strategy managing multi-cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform at Ripple, balancing reliability, security, cost, and developer velocity
• Lead multiple teams and managers across compute platform, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and reliability engineering
• Define and deliver the multi-year infrastructure roadmap, including cluster architecture, workload orchestration, service networking, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD
• Set the standard for operational excellence through SLOs, incident response, on-call health, blameless postmortems, and dynamic rollout practices, and hold the organization to it
• Drive multi-cloud strategy and execution: workload placement, portability, avoiding accidental lock-in, disaster recovery, and multi-region resilience
• Partner with Security and Compliance to build infrastructure that satisfies SOC 2, ISO 27001, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements without slowing engineering down
• Own cloud spend for your organization, with clear accountability for efficiency and unit economics as the platform scales
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture reviews, design docs, incident escalations, and occasional pull requests
• Mentor and grow the professional and technical development of your team, both managers and individual contributors
• Establish team objectives and quarterly plans in alignment with business and organizational goals
• Translate infrastructure investments into terms that resonate with engineers, product leaders, and executives alike
• Scale the organization by attracting, hiring, and developing exceptional leaders and engineers at all levels

What you bring

• 12+ years of hands-on software and infrastructure engineering experience, including 5+ years leading teams and managing managers
• Deep, production-grade experience with Kubernetes at scale, including multi-cluster and multi-tenant operations, upgrade strategy, workload isolation, autoscaling, and failure modes learned through operational experience
• Experience operating across more than one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear point of view on where multi-cloud pays for itself and where it doesn't
• Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and declarative operations using Terraform, Helm, and GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux
• A track record building highly available, secure distributed systems and the observability to run them through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting that people actually trust
• Experience with service networking and service mesh technologies, and securing traffic and identity across cloud boundaries
• Demonstrated ability to improve developer experience measurably in build and deploy times, environment provisioning, and self-service platform capabilities
• Experience partnering with security and regulatory oversight functions in a regulated environment; comfort with least-privilege, key management, and audit requirements
• Experience with Agile development, with a focus on robust design, scalability, and security
• Solid leadership and communication skills, with the judgment to know when to decide, when to delegate, and when to dig in yourself
• Eagerness to work openly and collaboratively with a diverse team, with a positive attitude and a passion for sharing knowledge
• BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science or similar

Nice to have

• Experience in FinTech, payments, or crypto infrastructure
• Familiarity with blockchain node operations
• Exposure to hardware security modules or high-assurance key management systems

What we offer

• Annual base salary of $272,000-$340,000 USD for positions based in California, plus equity and bonuses
• Competitive benefits covering physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
• Professional development budget to support learning
• Flexible in-office collaboration, with managers and teams deciding which 10+ days per month to come in
• R&R days to rest and recharge
• Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite and virtual programming
• Generous vacation policy, coordinated with your manager
• Industry-leading parental leave policies and family planning benefits
• Employee giving match
• Mobile phone stipend
• Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens, and team offsites and bonding activities

About Ripple

Ripple builds crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments, and developers to improve the global financial system. The company operates a multi-cloud, Kubernetes-native platform spanning multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions, engineered for the availability and security standards expected by financial institution customers.