Staff Software Engineer
Ripple provides crypto and blockchain solutions for enterprises, enabling global financial entities to move, manage, and tokenize value. They focus on improving existing financial systems through partnerships and regulatory compliance, with products used in over 50 countries.
About Ripple
Ripple is an enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions company that aims to enable the world to move value as seamlessly as information moves today. Their mission is to build breakthrough crypto solutions for a world without economic borders. Using blockchain technology, Ripple facilitates global financial institutions, businesses, governments, and developers to move, manage, and tokenize value, thereby unlocking greater economic opportunity. The company works within existing financial systems to improve them, partnering with customers to streamline infrastructure and collaborating with regulators to ensure solutions are secure and compliant. Ripple's products are in commercial use by hundreds of customers across more than 50 countries, helping them expand into new markets, access liquidity solutions, and generate crypto-enabled revenue streams. They also support developers by providing tools for building on the XRP Ledger, a fast and sustainable public blockchain. Ripple’s payments, custody and stablecoin solutions empower financial institutions to integrate blockchain and digital assets into their business in a simple, secure, compliant way—all in one place. From instant payments to asset tokenization, blockchain and crypto are happening right now, across the world. It’s happening to suppliers, to retailers, to exchanges, to currencies, to sectors, to industries, to markets, and to global businesses. And it’s happening with Ripple.
Skills
About the Role
You will join the Platform Engineering team within Custody, where you'll own the design and development of secure enclave-based platforms that isolate and protect the most critical cryptographic operations. You'll work across trusted execution environments (TEEs) and define how highly sensitive components are deployed in strongly isolated environments while keeping reliability, operability, and developer velocity high. You'll operate at the intersection of distributed systems, applied cryptography, cloud infrastructure, and security engineering, taking on a hands-on technical leadership role where you design deep platform primitives, guide architecture across teams, and raise the security bar for custody infrastructure.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building production software, infrastructure, or distributed systems, with significant experience in security-sensitive and high-reliability environments
- Hands-on experience with enclave-based or confidential computing platforms used to isolate sensitive workloads, such as AWS Nitro Enclaves, Google Confidential Space / Confidential VMs, IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, Azure Confidential Computing, Intel SGX, AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, or similar technologies
- Strong hands-on programming experience in systems or backend languages such as Rust, Go, C, C++, or Java, with the ability to build reliable, maintainable services and platform components
- Practical experience designing and operating systems that protect highly sensitive data, including secrets, cryptographic keys, signing material, or privileged workloads
- Strong understanding of applied cryptography concepts, including encryption, digital signatures, key management, secure channels, attestation, and protection of data at rest, in transit, and in use
- Deep knowledge of Linux, operating system fundamentals, networking, process isolation, and hardened runtime environments
- Experience building or operating cloud-native infrastructure, including deployment automation, observability, service identity, access control, and production incident response
- Ability to reason clearly about trust boundaries, threat models, failure modes, and defense-in-depth controls
- Experience leading complex technical projects across teams, including architecture definition, technical design, implementation guidance, and mentoring senior engineers
- Preferred: Experience customising Linux kernels, building minimal operating environments, hardening OS images, or working close to hardware, virtualisation, or hypervisor boundaries
- Preferred: Experience with HSMs, MPC, threshold signing, secure key ceremonies, custody infrastructure, wallet systems, payment systems, blockchain infrastructure, or other high-assurance cryptographic platforms
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate secure enclave infrastructure for cryptographic workloads, including signing, key handling, authorization, and policy enforcement
- Develop platform abstractions that make enclave-based deployment reliable, observable, and usable by internal engineering teams
- Evaluate and integrate trusted execution technologies across cloud providers, including AWS Nitro Enclaves, GCP confidential computing offerings, and IBM HPVS
- Build secure communication patterns between enclaves and external services, including attestation, encrypted channels, service identity, and request validation
- Partner with cryptography, security, infrastructure, and product engineering teams to define secure architectures for custody-critical systems
- Lead threat modeling, design reviews, and implementation reviews for high-assurance components
- Improve operational maturity around enclave workloads, including deployment, monitoring, incident response, key rotation, recovery, and disaster scenarios
- Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across the Platform organization
- Contribute to security standards, engineering guidelines, and long-term platform strategy
Benefits
- Professional development budget
- Flexible in-office collaboration schedule
- Bi-weekly all-company meeting
- Team offsites, team bonding activities, and happy hours
- Bonuses and equity
- Health, retirement, family forming, and family support benefits
- Employee giving match
- Mobile phone stipend
- R&R days
- Wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
- Generous vacation policy
- Parental leave policies
- Family planning benefits
- Catered lunches and fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages