Staff Software Engineer

The Work

At Ripple, the Customer Onboarding Platform is where every customer's journey begins - and it's about to get a full-scale rebuild.

We recently became a horizontal platform team serving all Ripple products. Our next chapter:

• Unwinding years of Salesforce-bound logic into modern, engineering-owned backend services.
• Integrating best-in-class vendors like Persona for KYC/KYB, while building the surrounding orchestration, data flows, and service layer.
• Designing the systems and data model that will make onboarding scalable, observable, and reliable across products.

If you're a Staff-level engineer who thrives on modernizing fragile systems, building robust services around vendor integrations, and driving architecture at company-wide scale, this is your opportunity.

Why This Role Matters

Onboarding is where customers form their first impression of Ripple, and where trust is earned. As the technical anchor for a small, high-impact team, you will:

• Build for impact - Everything you create will serve multiple Ripple products, from Payments to Custody to Stablecoin.
• Start from zero - Design and build new backend services from the ground up to power onboarding across products.
• Tackle the hard stuff - Unwind years of technical debt while designing systems built to last.
• Shape Ripple's architecture - Partner with Product, Compliance, and Engineering to influence company-wide technical direction.
• Scale the right way - Mentor engineers and grow a high-performing team, with direct executive backing.

This isn't just about writing code, it's about designing how Ripple's onboarding platform will work for years to come.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and development of distributed, cloud-native backend services that power onboarding across Ripple's product suite.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, and other engineering teams to design scalable orchestration and data pipelines.
• Migrate core onboarding logic out of Salesforce into resilient, observable services and a dedicated persistence layer.
• Build platform capabilities that enable faster onboarding with fewer customer touchpoints - while preserving trust and compliance.
• Contribute to foundational data modeling work that will feed into Ripple's future identity platform (while ownership of Identity will move to a dedicated team).
• Champion engineering excellence in code quality, testing, and operational practices.
• Mentor engineers and help grow a lean, high-impact team.

What You'll Bring

Required

• Deep backend engineering experience in modern, cloud-native, distributed systems.
• Exposure and willingness to frontend frameworks (React, Vue, etc.) for full-stack capability.
• Proven track record designing and delivering large-scale systems in complex environments.
• Strong API design and integration skills (REST and/or gRPC).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS).
• Comfort navigating and reducing technical debt while delivering business value.
• Leadership skills: can set technical direction, mentor others, and influence cross-team decisions.

Preferred (But Not Required)

• Experience with our current stack: Java + Spring Boot.
• We welcome candidates from other backend stacks (Go, Kotlin, C#, Python, Rust, etc.) who can quickly learn JVM technologies.
• Event-driven architecture (Kafka, SNS/SQS, etc.).
• Domain knowledge in fintech, regtech, KYC/KYB, identity verification, or compliance-heavy systems.

Other common names for this role

For positions that will be based in CA, the annual salary range for this position is below. Actual salaries may vary based on numerous factors including, among other things, an individual applicant's experience and qualifications for the position. This range does not include equity or additional compensation, such as bonuses or commissions.

CA Annual Base Salary Range $212,000 - $265,000 USD

Take Control of Your Finances

• Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity
• Competitive benefits that cover physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
• Employee giving match
• Mobile phone stipend

Take Care of Yourself

• R&R days so you can rest and recharge
• Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
• Generous vacation policy - work with your manager to take time off when you need it
• Industry-leading parental leave policies. Family planning benefits.
• Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages, and plenty of fun events

Benefits listed above are for full-time employees.

Please find our California, UK/EU, Singapore, DIFC, ADGM, Australia, and Switzerland Applicant Privacy Notice for reference.