Senior Staff Software Architect — FinCrime Compliance Platform

Jobtailor; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Ripple is seeking a seasoned architect to own the multi-year vision for its compliance control plane. You will tackle complex, cross-team challenges with a focus on resilience, real-time decisioning, and regulator-grade auditability in a hybrid SF office setting.

You will drive engineering primitives, mentor senior staff, and partner with executives across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to raise technical standards and translate regulatory obligations into durable roadmaps.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building production backend systems.
• Deep expertise in Java or comparable JVM languages, Go, or Rust.
• Experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems at scale across multiple teams or organizations.
• Ability to set organizational-level technical direction and drive adoption across team boundaries without formal authority.
• Strong resilience and distributed-systems design skills, including failover, graceful degradation, idempotency, high-throughput real-time decisioning, and dependency-failure resilience.
• Excellent REST/gRPC API design judgment.
• Experience navigating ambiguity in regulated environments and converting regulatory, audit, and partner requirements into durable engineering plans.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, observability tooling such as Grafana or OpenTelemetry, and cloud infrastructure; AWS preferred.
• Track record developing senior and staff engineers and raising organizational technical standards.
• Experience in fintech, payments, identity, or compliance technology is a strong plus.
• Ability to work in a hybrid arrangement at Ripple’s San Francisco offices.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year architectural vision for Ripple’s compliance control plane.
• Drive complex technical problems including multi-vendor failover, sub-second decisioning, regulator-grade auditability, and resilience across dependency failures
• Define integration contracts, resilience patterns, and compliance primitives for adoption by partner engineering teams
• Translate regulatory obligations and organizational goals into engineering primitives and sequenced technical roadmaps
• Anticipate platform risks and scaling constraints and lead initiatives to address them
• Partner with executive leadership across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product
• Represent the platform’s technical position to auditors, regulators, and external partners
• Set standards for observability, alerting, incident response, and production reliability
• Mentor staff and senior engineers and improve architecture and design quality
• Build and operate real-time financial-crimes controls including sanctions screening, wallet risk analysis, transaction monitoring, and travel-rule compliance

Tools

Kubernetes

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

AWS

Job description

Ripple is seeking a seasoned architect to own the multi-year vision for its compliance control plane. You will tackle complex, cross-team challenges with a focus on resilience, real-time decisioning, and regulator-grade auditability in a hybrid SF office setting.

You will drive engineering primitives, mentor senior staff, and partner with executives across Engineering, Compliance, Legal, and Product to raise technical standards and translate regulatory obligations into durable roadmaps.