Senior Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Ripple's Financial Crimes Engineering team, you will set the multi-year technical direction for the compliance control plane that determines whether payments clear in real time. You will own the architecture of a vendor-agnostic, resilient system that handles real-time financial crimes controls including sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. This is a role where you define which problems the organization solves, 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
• 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 by defining the integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives that partner engineering teams adopt, and drive alignment across organizational boundaries
• Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced technical roadmap
• 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
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, elevate design quality through architecture review, and raise the ceiling of what the team can take on

What you bring

• 12+ years building production backend systems, with deep expertise in Java, comparable JVM languages, Go, or 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
• 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 such as Grafana or OpenTelemetry, and cloud infrastructure with AWS preferred
• A track record of developing senior and staff engineers and measurably lifting the technical bar of an organization

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology
• Background from other high-stakes domains requiring exceptional systems architecture

What we offer

• Annual base salary range of $236,000-$295,000 USD (for California positions), plus equity and bonuses
• Competitive benefits covering physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
• Professional development budget to support learning
• Generous vacation policy; work with your manager to take time off when you need it
• R&R days for rest and recharge
• Industry-leading parental leave and family planning benefits
• Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite and virtual programming
• Employee giving match and mobile phone stipend
• Flexible in-office collaboration: 10+ days a month, with managers and teams deciding which days work best
• Team offsites, team bonding activities, happy hours, catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens, and other company events

About Ripple

Ripple is building the Internet of Value, infrastructure that moves money as fast as information moves today. Through crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments, and developers, Ripple is improving the global financial system and creating greater economic opportunity worldwide.