Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes - Ripple

Ripple Senior Staff Software EngineerRipple 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.This role is hybrid in our San Francisco officesAnnual Base Salary Range $236,000—$295,000 USDWhat You'll Bring12+ 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 involvementDemonstrated ability to set technical direction at the organizational level and drive adoption of standards and patterns across team boundaries without formal authorityStrong 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 controlExcellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC) and a history of establishing patterns that become organizational defaultsProven 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 examinersWorking 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 organizationExperience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology is a strong plus, though exceptional systems architects from adjacent high-stakes domains are welcomeWhy This RoleConsequence: 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.Who We AreDo Your Best WorkThe opportunity to build in a fast-paced start-up environment with experienced industry leadersA learning environment where you can dive deep into the latest technologies and make an impact. A professional development budget to support other modes of learning.Thrive in an environment where no matter what race, ethnicity, gender, origin, or culture they identify with, every employee is a respected, valued, and empowered part of the team.In-office collaboration for moments that matter is important to our culture, and we give managers and teams the flexibility to decide which 10+ days a month they come in.Bi-weekly all-company meeting - business updates and ask me anything style discussion with our Leadership TeamWe come together for moments that matter which include team offsites, team bonding activities, happy hours and more!Take Control of Your FinancesCompetitive salary, bonuses, and equityCompetitive benefits that cover physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family supportEmployee giving matchMobile phone stipendTake Care of YourselfR&R days so you can rest and rechargeGenerous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programmingGenerous vacation policy - work with your manager to take time off when you need itIndustry-leading parental leave policies. Family planning benefits.Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages, and plenty of fun events The Job Sauce