Senior Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

Ripple Ripple · Fintech · San Francisco, CA +1 · Engineering

Senior Software Engineer role focused on building and operating the real-time financial crimes controls platform at Ripple, which includes sanctions screening, risk analysis, and transaction monitoring. The role involves designing and implementing distributed backend services, ensuring system resilience, and owning production aspects like observability and incident response within a regulated fintech environment.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and build distributed backend services that orchestrate real-time screening across multiple risk domains, integrating internal Ripple systems with external compliance data providers
  2. Architect for resilience to keep payments flowing even when upstream dependencies degrade
  3. Build the decision and data plane that powers compliance operations: alerting, audit trails, case management workflows, investigator tooling
  4. Own production: define observability, alerting, and incident response
  5. Partner with Compliance, Global Investigations, and Product to translate evolving regulatory requirements into durable engineering primitives

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years building production backend systems in Java (or comparable JVM languages, Go, Rust)
  • Strong API design instincts (REST/gRPC)
  • Experience with distributed systems patterns
  • Demonstrated comfort with resilience design
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity in a regulated environment, turning external requirements (regulator findings, audit obligations, partner asks) into shippable engineering plans
  • Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar), and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)

Nice to have

  • Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology is a plus

What the JD emphasized

  • real-time screening
  • resilience
  • regulated environment
  • real-time decisioning
  • regulator-grade audit trails