Senior Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes
Ripple
- Location
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- Work model
- On-Site
- Level
- Staff
- Salary
- $236k/yr
- Posted
- 1h ago
Skills
About this role
At Ripple, we’re building a world where value moves like information does today. It’s big, it’s bold, and we’re already doing it. Through our crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments and developers, we are improving the global financial system and creating greater economic fairness and opportunity for more people, in more places around the world. And we get to do the best work of our career and grow our skills surrounded by colleagues who have our backs.
If you’re ready to see your impact and unlock incredible career growth opportunities, join us, and build real world value.
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