Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering

Ripple; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 208,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Bonuses and equity

Wellness reimbursement

Generous vacation policy

Job summary

Ripple is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Engineering team in San Francisco. In this role, you will set the technical direction for the Caspian Data Platform. You will be responsible for leading the design and development of ingestion, transformation, and data quality components, establishing benchmarks for governance, and mentoring team members.

The ideal candidate has over 10 years of data engineering experience and deep expertise in Databricks and AWS. The position offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of data engineering experience with a strong track record.
• Deep mastery of Databricks and related technologies.
• Demonstrated ownership of data governance and quality.

Responsibilities

• Lead design for ingestion and data quality components.
• Define engineering patterns and reference architectures.
• Establish benchmarks for data governance.

Skills

Data engineering experience

Mastery of Databricks

Expert in SQL

Strong AWS experience

Technical bar raiser

Influencing technical credibility

Tools

Databricks

Delta Lake

Spark

Python

SQL

Agentic systems

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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team, you set the technical direction for the Caspian Data Platform — Ripple's centralized lakehouse powering analytics, financial reporting, product intelligence, and data-driven operations across every business unit. You own the architecture for ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across the platform, and you stay deep in the code while you do it. You are the bar raiser for the team: the engineer who sets the standard for how data is built at Ripple, and the others learn from by working alongside you.

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.

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

$208,000 – $260,000 USD

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 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.

Ripple is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We do not discriminate against qualified employees or applicants because of race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, sexual identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance.

Please find our UK/EU Applicant Privacy Notice and California Applicant Privacy Notice for reference.