Staff Software Engineer

Ripple is building financial infrastructure for the modern world, enabling value to move across borders as seamlessly as information does today. The company works with financial institutions, businesses, governments and developers to modernize the global financial system through blockchain and crypto solutions. You'd be joining a mission-driven team where your technical work directly impacts how millions of people access financial services.

The Customer Onboarding Platform team at Ripple recently transitioned to become a horizontal platform serving all products. You'll lead the complete modernization of this critical system, moving years of accumulated logic out of Salesforce into purpose-built backend services. This is a greenfield opportunity to design the architecture that will power onboarding for Ripple's Payments, Custody, and Stablecoin products for years to come.

What you'll do

• Design and build distributed, cloud-native backend services from the ground up to handle onboarding across multiple Ripple product lines.

• Migrate core onboarding workflows from Salesforce into resilient, observable microservices with a modern data model.

• Integrate third-party vendors like Persona for KYC and KYB verification, building the orchestration layer and data pipelines around them.

• Work with Product, Compliance, and other engineering teams to create scalable systems that reduce customer friction while maintaining trust and regulatory requirements.

• Contribute to foundational identity data modeling that will support Ripple's future identity platform initiative.

• Establish engineering standards around testing, observability, and operational excellence across the platform.

• Mentor engineers on your team and help scale a lean, high-impact group.

What you'll bring

• Significant backend engineering experience with modern, distributed systems and cloud-native architecture.

• Proven ability to design and ship large-scale systems in complex, regulated environments.

• Strong skills in API design and vendor integration, working with REST and gRPC.

• Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, or container orchestration platforms.

• Demonstrated ability to navigate technical debt, refactor fragile systems, and still deliver business value.

• Leadership capability: you set technical direction, mentor other engineers, and influence decisions across teams.

• Willingness to work across the stack with frontend frameworks like React or Vue when needed.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Java and Spring Boot, though engineers from Go, Kotlin, C#, Python, or Rust backgrounds who learn JVM tech quickly are welcome.

• Background with event-driven patterns using Kafka, SNS, or SQS.

• Domain experience in fintech, compliance systems, KYC/KYB workflows, or identity verification.

What we offer

• Annual base salary range of 212,000 to 265,000 USD (California).

• Professional development budget to support continuous learning.

• Flexible in-office policy with 10+ days per month for team collaboration.

• Fast-paced startup environment alongside experienced industry leaders.