Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering, Infrastructure

San Francisco, CA, United States

Please note this is for San Francisco, CA, United States. You only need to apply to one location if there are multiple listed for the job.

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.

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 embrace meaningful challenges, join us, and build real world value.

Every payment, every custody operation, and every line of code at Ripple runs on the infrastructure our platform teams build. We operate a multi-cloud, Kubernetes-native environment spanning multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions, engineered for the availability and security standards our financial institution customers expect — and for the developer velocity our engineers need. The systems this organization owns are the substrate for everything Ripple ships.

We have a big vision and the ambition to match. We are seeking the same in engineering leaders. You see infrastructure not as plumbing but as leverage: the difference between an engineering organization that ships weekly and one that ships continuously, between a platform that survives a regional outage and one that doesn't notice it happened.

We're looking for a hands-on engineering leader to develop and guide the teams responsible for Ripple's cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead the technical and organizational strategy managing multi-cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform at Ripple, balancing reliability, security, cost, and developer velocity y
• 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 — and hold the organization to it
• Drive multi-cloud strategy and execution: workload placement, portability, avoiding accidental lock-in, disaster recovery, and multi-region resilience
• Partner with Security and Compliance to build infrastructure that satisfies SOC 2, ISO 27001, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements without slowing engineering down
• Own cloud spend for your organization, with clear accountability for efficiency and unit economics as the platform scales
• Provide hands-on technical leadership — architecture reviews, design docs, incident escalations, and the occasional pull request
• Mentor and grow the professional and technical development of your team, both managers and individual contributors
• Establish team objectives and quarterly plans in alignment with business and organizational goals
• Translate infrastructure investments into terms that resonate with engineers, product leaders, and executives alike
• Scale the organization by attracting, hiring, and developing exceptional leaders and engineers at all levels

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 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 — multi-cluster and multi-tenant operations, upgrade strategy, workload isolation, autoscaling, and the failure modes you only learn about the hard way
• Experience operating across more than one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear point of view on where multi-cloud pays for itself and where it doesn't
• Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and declarative operations (Terraform, Helm, GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux)
• Track record building highly available, secure distributed systems and the observability to run them (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting that people actually trust)
• Experience with service networking and service mesh technologies, and with securing traffic and identity across cloud boundaries
• Demonstrated ability to improve developer experience measurably — build and deploy times, environment provisioning, self-service platform capabilities
• Experience partnering with security and regulatory oversight functions in a regulated environment; comfort with least-privilege, key management, and audit requirements
• Experience with Agile development, with a focus on robust design, scalability, and security
• Solid leadership and communication skills, with the judgment to know when to decide, when to delegate, and when to dig in yourself
• Eagerness to work openly and collaboratively with a diverse team, with a positive attitude and a passion for sharing knowledge
• BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science or similar

Nice to have: experience in FinTech, payments, or crypto infrastructure; familiarity with blockchain node operations; exposure to hardware security modules or high-assurance key management systems.

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 $272,000 — $340,000 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 our California Applicant Privacy Notice for reference.

Req ID: 26648