Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Ripple

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. We are seeking an innovative and forward-thinking Staff Software Developer passionate about building a world-class platform through a world-class team. Creating technical software excellence and spearheading application development in design, implementation, and maintenance to make great things happen. About the Cash Forecasting team: Cash Forecasting is our AI-amplified treasury solution that helps CFOs and treasury teams move beyond error-prone spreadsheets to achieve real-time cash visibility and predictive accuracy. The platform integrates seamlessly with major ERPs and banking systems to automatically capture, categorize, and analyze transactional data across multiple currencies and business units. Leveraging our proprietary GSmart AI technology, the solution continuously learns from historical cash flows, sales data, and treasury information to automatically select optimal forecasting algorithms and improve accuracy by over 30%. You'll work on sophisticated machine learning models, automated variance analysis, real-time data orchestration from diverse financial sources, and intuitive dashboards that allow users to drill down from high-level summaries to individual transaction details. This is a critical platform managing over $100 billion in daily cash flow for enterprise customers across 40+ countries, with the technical challenge of delivering rapid 90-day implementations while maintaining enterprise-grade security and scalability. What You’ll Do – Be a Force Multiplier: Technical Leadership & Architecture: • Drive architectural decisions for the platform, balancing scalability, maintainability, and rapid deployment goals • Establish technical standards and design patterns that enable the team to ship features faster with fewer defects • Lead technical design reviews and provide constructive feedback that elevates the team's architectural thinking • Identify and eliminate technical debt strategically, creating roadmaps that improve both developer velocity and system reliability Team Enablement & Mentorship: • Mentor mid-level and senior engineers, helping them grow into technical leadership roles • Break down complex, ambiguous problems into actionable work that distributes effectively across the team • Establish coding standards, review practices, and testing strategies that improve overall code quality • Champion engineering standard processes including observability, incident response, and production excellence • Share your enthusiasm for tech trends, explore and learn new technologies, engage with tech communities, mentor fellow engineers, and lead in technical design and code evaluations Multi-functional Impact: • Partner with Product and Customer Success teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions • Collaborate across distributed teams (Ireland, U.S., Philippines, Australia) to drive alignment on technical approaches • Influence product roadmap by identifying technical opportunities that create competitive advantages • Bridge the gap between technical implementation and business value, helping the team prioritize high-impact work Increase Agility: • Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the development lifecycle that slow down the entire team • Improve CI/CD pipelines, testing infrastructure, and deployment processes to increase velocity • Drive adoption of modern engineering practices that improve developer experience and productivity • Lead post-mortems and blameless retrospectives that turn incidents into learning opportunities Strategic Technical Vision: • Anticipate future scalability challenges before they become blockers (e.g., handling 10x growth in transaction volume) • Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend when/how to adopt them (e.g., new ML frameworks, database technologies) • Design systems that support the 90-day implementation promise while maintaining enterprise-grade quality • Balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery, knowing when "good enough now" beats "perfect later" Ownership & Accountability: • Own critical systems end-to-end, from design through production support • Take responsibility for production reliability and proactively prevent incidents • Step into ambiguous situations and drive them to resolution without needing explicit direction • Lead by example in code quality, documentation, and operational excellence • Make tough technical trade-off decisions and clearly communicate the reasoning What You’ll Work On: Integration & Data Connectivity: • Build and maintain API integrations with major ERPs (SAP, Oracle, Workday) and banking systems to automatically pull transactional data AI/ML Features: • Develop and optimize machine learning models for the GSmart AI engine that predicts cash flows and automatically selects optimal forecasting algorithms • Build automated variance analysis systems that compare actuals vs. forecasts and generate actionable insights • Create pattern recognition algorithms to identify anomalies, seasonal trends, and customer payment behaviors Platform Development: • Design and implement flexible worksheet engines that allow users to customize cash flow models, categories, and reporting calendars Performance & Scalability: • Optimize data processing for handling billions of dollars in daily transactions • Build caching and aggregation strategies for real-time dashboard performance • Design distributed systems architecture to support a 90-day rapid implementation model Reporting & Analytics: • Create interactive dashboards and visualization components for cash position insights • Build automated notification systems for covenant compliance monitoring and unusual variance alerts Essential Knowledge / Experience: Years & Scope: • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience • 3+ years working on complex, business-critical systems in production • Experience working on products with significant scale • Strong communication skills with experience working in multi-functional projects • Track record of delivering projects that span multiple quarters and require coordination across teams System Ownership: • Owned and evolved significant portions of a production system end-to-end • Been on-call for production systems and handled critical incidents • Led technical designs that were implemented by teams of 3+ engineers • Made architectural decisions that had lasting impact on system capabilities Technical Leadership: • Mentored 2+ engineers to help them level up technically • Established technical patterns that were adopted across the team • Led technical spikes to evaluate new technologies or approaches Cloud & Infrastructure: • Proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP) • Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) • Understanding of infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipeline design • Knowledge of observability: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting strategies • Experience with microservices deployment patterns and service mesh concepts Enterprise Software Patterns: • Deep understanding of distributed systems patterns, even driven architectures, and message queues • Multi-tenancy architecture and data isolation strategies • Role-based access control (RBAC) and authorization patterns • Audit logging and compliance requirements for financial systems • API versioning and backward compatibility strategies • Feature flagging and progressive rollout techniques Core Technologies: • Deep expertise with Ruby on Rails • Expert in RDBMS (ideally PostGres), including query optimization, indexing strategies, and data modeling • Deep experience in building large scale multi-tenant applications • Experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs and understanding when to use alternative patterns (GraphQL, gRPC, webhooks) • Deep knowledge in building applications using React, TypeScript, JavaScript, and related technologies Preferred Knowledge / Experience: • Understanding of financial concepts: cash positioning, forecasting, liquidity management • Knowledge of banking systems, payment rails, and financial data formats (MT940, BAI2, SWIFT) • Understanding of multi-currency handling, exchange rates, and date/time complexities across time zones • Awareness of financial compliance and regulatory requirements (SOC 2, data privacy) • Experience integrating with third-party financial systems (banks, ERPs, payment processors) 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 our California Applicant Privacy Notice for reference.