About the Role
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 others learn from working alongside you.
Requirements
- 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 including Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark
- 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
- Experience driving AI tooling into data engineering workflows such as building agentic systems, integrating LLMs into developer workflows, or enabling conversational analytics
- Ability to influence through technical credibility and translate tradeoffs for both engineers and leadership
Responsibilities
- 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
- Stay hands-on shipping production flows, writing reference implementations, and prototyping hard parts before the team scales them
- Establish the benchmark for data quality and governance including expectations, data contracts, lineage, and validation frameworks
- Hold the team to standards 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 including agentic systems for pipeline operations, automated transformation generation, and self-serve analytics interfaces
- Develop first versions of AI tooling yourself
- Act as the quality standard bearer by raising code quality, build rigor, and engineering judgment across the team
- Mentor senior engineers into greater ownership
Benefits
- Professional development budget
- Flexible in-office collaboration schedule
- Bi-weekly all-company meeting
- Team offsites, team bonding activities, and happy hours
- Competitive bonuses and equity
- Competitive benefits covering physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
- Employee giving match
- Mobile phone stipend
- R&R days
- Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
- Generous vacation policy
- Industry-leading parental leave policies and family planning benefits
- Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages, and fun events