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Job
· Principal
Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes
Software Engineer
• Principal
• On-site
• Full-time
•
San Francisco, USA
Ripple's Financial Crimes Engineering team builds and operates the real-time compliance control layer: sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel rule compliance. As Staff Software Engineer, you'll own the architecture of the compliance control plane and set technical direction for turning regulatory obligations into engineering reality.
Responsibilities
- ▹Set architectural direction for the compliance control plane: real-time screening orchestration, resilience/observability layer, vendor-agnostic integration
- ▹Drive the hardest, highest-ambiguity problems end to end: multi-vendor failover, sub-second decisioning under load, regulator-grade auditability
- ▹Translate evolving regulatory obligations and organizational goals into durable engineering primitives and a sequenced roadmap
- ▹Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints before they become incidents
- ▹Partner with senior leaders to align complex cross-functional objectives
- ▹Set standards for production ownership: observability, alerting, incident response
- ▹Mentor senior and mid-level engineers
Requirements
- ▹8+ years building production backend systems, with deep expertise in Java (or comparable JVM languages, Go, Rust)
- ▹Track record owning architecture for complex distributed systems at scale
- ▹Demonstrated ability to drive technical direction and influence across teams
- ▹Strong resilience and distributed-systems design instincts: failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning
- ▹Excellent API design judgment (REST/gRPC)
- ▹Proven skill navigating regulated environments, turning audit findings into shippable engineering plans
- ▹Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
- ▹History of mentoring engineers
Nice to have
- ▹Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology
Soft skills
Technical leadership while staying hands-on with codeMentorship and raising the team's engineering barNavigating ambiguity in a regulated environment
What we offer
- ▹Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity
- ▹Benefits covering physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
- ▹Employee giving match
- ▹Mobile phone stipend
- ▹R&R days
- ▹Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite/virtual programming
- ▹Generous vacation policy
- ▹Industry-leading parental leave
- ▹Catered lunches, stocked kitchens, and events
About the company
Ripple is building the Internet of Value through crypto solutions for financial institutions, businesses, governments, and developers, aiming to make value move as fast as information does today and create greater economic fairness worldwide.
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