Senior Director, Security Engineering

As Senior Director of Security Engineering at Ripple, you build and lead a dedicated team of Security Engineers to secure Ripple's products, infrastructure, and corporate IT systems. You play a substantial role in defining security strategy across the entire company, embedding security into every layer of the technology stack. This is a hands-on role requiring deep technical understanding, with particular focus on AI security as the company navigates how to use AI tooling and agentic workflows securely and auditably.

What you'll do

• Set the strategic vision and roadmap for the Security Engineering team, focusing on product security, infrastructure security, IT security, and AI security, including agentic guardrails and AI-assisted development risk.
• Serve as a security domain expert, providing guidance and communicating security risks and concepts to senior leadership, engineering teams, and other partners.
• Define guardrails around AI agents and tools operating within Ripple's environment, including scope boundaries, blast radius limits, and rollback mechanisms.
• Implement and enforce agentic SDLC guardrails, testing gates, and human oversight of AI-assisted development workflows.
• Lead, mentor, and strengthen a team of security engineers, cultivating an atmosphere that values technical excellence, continual learning, and innovation.
• Drive the implementation of security guidelines across the engineering organization, ensuring security is integrated into day-to-day development processes.
• Lead security architecture reviews for new products, infrastructure changes, and major engineering initiatives, serving as a formal checkpoint before systems go to production.
• Own the vulnerability management program, including coordinating penetration testing, prioritizing remediation, and partnering with engineering teams to close risk at pace.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and IT leadership to ensure alignment on security priorities and to champion security outcomes on behalf of customers.

What you bring

• 15+ years of experience in security engineering, with at least 5+ years in a leadership or management role, preferably in the crypto, blockchain, or FinTech space.
• Hands-on expertise in AI security, including a clear understanding of the risk surface introduced by LLMs, AI agents, and AI-assisted development workflows, and how to build guardrails around them.
• Expert-level knowledge of security architecture, including cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), modern application stacks, and network security.
• Strong understanding of cryptographic principles, secure coding practices, and common web and blockchain vulnerabilities (e.g., OWASP Top 10).
• Experience with authentication and authorization standards (OAuth, SAML, OIDC) and their security implications.
• Demonstrated expertise in IT security, including endpoint protection, network security, identity and access management (IAM), and corporate security policy enforcement.
• Hands-on experience with threat modeling methodologies and risk identification techniques.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and security risks to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A track record of fostering a positive security culture within an organization and proven experience leading and building a high-performing security team.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to effectively and creatively manage complex security challenges.

What we offer

• Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity.
• Competitive benefits covering physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support.
• Employee giving match and mobile phone stipend.
• R&R days to rest and recharge.
• Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite and virtual programming.
• Generous vacation policy, work with your manager to take time off when you need it.
• Industry-leading parental leave policies and family planning benefits.
• Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks and beverages, and team events.
• Professional development budget to support learning.
• In-office collaboration with flexibility for managers and teams to decide which 10+ days a month they come in.
• Bi-weekly all-company meetings with business updates and leadership discussions.

About Ripple

Ripple builds a world where value moves like information does today, through crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments and developers. The company is improving the global financial system and creating greater economic fairness and opportunity worldwide.