Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering

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 Senior Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team, you are a core builder of the Caspian Data Platform — Ripple's centralized lakehouse that powers analytics, financial reporting, product intelligence, and data-driven operations across every business unit. You own the design and delivery of production-grade pipelines end to end. You raise the engineering bar for the team through code reviews, technical design, and mentorship. You operate with high autonomy on complex, cross-functional data initiatives and bring sound judgment to tradeoffs around performance, cost, reliability, and maintainability. What you'll do - Design, build, and operate production ETL pipelines on Databricks using Delta Live Tables and Spark, applying medallion architecture patterns across Finance, Payments, Product, and GTM domains. - Own data modeling in different layers — defining governed, reusable table structures that serve as reliable sources of truth for business metrics and downstream consumption. - Drive technical design for projects spanning multiple teams, writing clear design documents that articulate architecture, tradeoffs, and rollout plans. - Build pipeline observability into your work — failure detection, alerting, retry logic, and the operational hygiene that keeps oncall burden low. - Integrate AI tooling into data workflows: agentic systems for pipeline triage, automated code generation for transformations, and natural language interfaces for data access. - Mentor engineers, reviewing their code and designs and helping them grow into more complex ownership. - Contribute to platform infrastructure through Terraform, and work with Unity Catalog to establish data contracts, access controls, and lineage. What you'll bring - 5–8 years of hands-on data engineering experience building and maintaining production pipelines and data models. - Deep proficiency with Databricks or similar platforms — Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and PySpark or Spark SQL as primary tools. - Strong SQL skills: complex transformations, incremental materialization, schema evolution, and data quality validation. - Solid AWS experience relevant to building and operating data systems at scale. - Proficiency in Python for data engineering — ingestion, transformation, testing, and utility tooling. - Experience with CI/CD tooling such as GitLab and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform. - Exposure to AI tooling in a data context — whether building agents, using LLMs for code generation, or enabling self-serve analytics workflows. - The ability to take ambiguous requirements, define the right data model and pipeline design, and deliver with minimal oversight. Nice to have - Familiarity with financial, payments, or blockchain data. - Experience with Fivetran or similar ingestion tools and their operational patterns. 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 $168,000—$210,000 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 o