Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering

Ripple; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Professional development budget

Bi-weekly all-hands

Job summary

Ripple is seeking a senior data engineer to design and own the platform pillars—ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality. You will implement reference architectures for Databricks pipelines, ship production flows, and set data contracts and validation standards.

With 10+ years in data engineering, you will lead complex initiatives, apply AI tooling to pipelines, and mentor engineers to raise the team’s technical bar while delivering scalable, production-grade data solutions at

Qualifications

• 10+ years of data engineering experience.
• Deep mastery of Databricks stack (Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Spark).
• Experience leading and delivering complex data platform initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of core pillars of the platform: ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality.
• Define engineering patterns and reference architectures for Databricks pipelines; ship production flows.
• Establish data quality and governance benchmarks with data contracts, lineage, validation—enforce through reviews.
• Lead complex initiatives spanning quarters and teams from problem to delivery.
• Drive AI tooling in data engineering workflows and prototype first versions.
• Mentor senior engineers to raise ownership and code quality.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data modeling

Technical leadership

Tools

Databricks

Delta Lake

Delta Live Tables

Unity Catalog

Spark

AWS

Job description

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.

Role Overview

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.

What you'll do

• Lead the design of the core pillars of the platform - ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality - and build the most critical components yourself.
• Define the engineering patterns and reference architectures for Databricks pipelines, and stay hands-on shipping production flows, writing the reference implementations, and prototyping the hard parts before the team scales them.
• Establish the benchmark for data quality and governance - expectations, data contracts, lineage, validation frameworks - and hold the team to it through building and code review.
• Lead the most complex, ambiguous initiatives that span multiple quarters and teams, from problem statement to delivered capability.
• Lead the technical direction for applying AI across data engineering. This includes agentic systems for pipeline operations, automated transformation generation, and self-serve analytics interfaces. Develop the first versions yourself.
• Act as the quality standard bearer: raise code quality, build rigor, and engineering judgment across the team, and mentor senior engineers into greater ownership.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, with a strong track record of architecting and operating data platforms at scale - while remaining deeply hands-on.
• Deep mastery of Databricks - Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark - with the judgment to make platform-level decisions and the skill to implement them.
• Demonstrated ownership of ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across a production platform.
• Expert in SQL and Python, applied to complex data modeling, transformation, and platform tooling.
• Strong AWS experience operating data systems at scale.
• A history of being the technical bar raiser - setting standards and patterns that other engineers build on, and lifting the quality of everyone around you.
• Experience driving AI tooling into data engineering workflows - building agentic systems, integrating LLMs into developer workflows, or enabling conversational analytics.
• The ability to influence through technical credibility and translate tradeoffs for both engineers and leadership.

WHO WE ARE:

• Do Your Best Work
• The opportunity to build in a fast-paced start-up environment with experienced industry leaders
• A learning environment where you can dive deep into the latest technologies and make an impact. A professional development budget to support other modes of learning.
• Thrive in an environment where no matter what race, ethnicity, gender, origin, or culture they identify with, every employee is a respected, valued, and empowered part of the team.
• In-office collaboration for moments that matter is important to our culture, and we give managers and teams the flexibility to decide which 10+ days a month they come in.
• Bi-weekly all-company meeting - business updates and ask me anything style discussion with our Leadership Team
• We come together for moments that matter which include team offsites, team bonding activities, happy hours and more!
• Take Control of Your Finances
• Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity
• Competitive benefits that cover physical