Senior Director, Kubernetes & Cloud Infrastructure

Ripple; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 272,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity and bonuses

Health, dental, vision

Retirement plan

Employee giving match

Mobile stipend

R&R days

Wellness reimbursement

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Catered lunches

Job summary

Ripple is seeking an hands-on engineering leader to develop and guide teams responsible for its cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience. You will shape multi-cloud strategies, drive reliability, and partner with security to meet regulatory requirements in a fast-paced FinTech environment.

The role demands 12+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years leading teams, deep Kubernetes expertise, and a track record of delivering scalable, secure systems.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of hands-on software and infrastructure engineering experience, including 5+ years leading teams and managing managers.
• Deep production-grade experience with Kubernetes at scale across multi-cluster and multi-tenant operations.
• Experience operating across more than one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear point of view on multi-cloud economics.
• Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and declarative operations (Terraform, Helm, GitOps tooling).
• Track record building highly available, secure distributed systems with strong observability.
• Experience with service networking, security and regulatory oversight in a regulated environment.
• Solid leadership and communication skills with a bias for action and mentorship.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical and organizational strategy for multi-cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform at Ripple, balancing reliability, security, cost, and developer velocity.
• Lead multiple teams and managers across compute platform, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and reliability engineering.
• Define and deliver the multi-year infrastructure roadmap, including cluster architecture, workload orchestration, service networking, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD.
• Set the standard for operational excellence — SLOs, incident response, on-call health, blameless postmortems, and dynamic rollout practices.
• Drive multi-cloud strategy and execution: workload placement, portability, avoiding vendor lock-in, disaster recovery, and multi-region resilience.
• Partner with Security and Compliance to meet SOC 2, ISO 27001, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements.
• Own cloud spend with clear accountability for efficiency and unit economics as the platform scales.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership — architecture reviews, design docs, incident escalations, and pull requests.
• Mentor and grow the professional and technical development of team members and engineers.
• Establish team objectives and quarterly plans aligned with business goals.
• Translate infrastructure investments into terms that resonate with engineers, product leaders, and executives.
• Scale the organization by attracting, hiring, and developing exceptional leaders and engineers at all levels.

Skills

Kubernetes

Multi-cloud

Infrastructure as code

Terraform

Helm

GitOps

Argo CD

Flux

Security & compliance

Leadership

Communication

Agile

Observability

Education

BS in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Helm

GitOps tooling

Argo CD

Flux

Job description

Ripple is seeking an hands-on engineering leader to develop and guide teams responsible for its cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience. You will shape multi-cloud strategies, drive reliability, and partner with security to meet regulatory requirements in a fast-paced FinTech environment.

The role demands 12+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years leading teams, deep Kubernetes expertise, and a track record of delivering scalable, secure systems.