Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

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.

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 Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll set technical direction for that platform. You'll own the architecture of the compliance control plane: the vendor-agnostic, resilient, provable system that lets Ripple move value without moving financial crime, and you'll drive its evolution across Ripple's product lines. This is a role for someone who operates beyond individual services: you'll define the technical strategy others build against, anticipate where the platform needs to go before it's asked, and raise the engineering bar across the team.

• Set architectural direction for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, the resilience and observability layer, vendor-agnostic integration, and the decision/data plane, designing for where the platform needs to be across future jurisdictions and product surfaces, not just today's requirements

• 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

• Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced technical roadmap, with milestones and clear execution plans

• Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints before they become incidents, and lead the initiatives that address them

• Partner directly with senior leaders to align complex cross-functional objectives and shape how regulatory requirements become engineering reality

• Set standards for production ownership: observability, alerting, incident response, and raise the reliability bar for the whole team

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, elevate design quality across the team, and act as a technical multiplier: the engineer whose presence makes everyone around them better

• 8+ 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, not just building within an existing design, but defining the design others build against

• Demonstrated ability to drive technical direction across