Staff Cloud Architect

Are you interested in pioneering and breaking new ground in large-scale financial data processing? Then this role might be for you. Join the Ripple Treasury Reconciliation team where you’ll be solving complex problems and having fun while passionately discussing (and arguing) with your team members!

About the Reconciliation team

Ripple Treasury Reconciliation platform sits at the heart of how the world's largest financial institutions and enterprises close their books and bring more control to their financial processes. Our vision is to create a completely new user experience with financial tools that have no equals on the market. With users first in mind and driven by technology.

As part of Ripple, we're backed by the scale and ambition of a company reshaping global finance, giving our team the resources to modernize the mission-critical product while still moving with the speed and ownership of a smaller engineering group. If you want your code to directly touch how billions of transactions get reconciled every day, this is that kind of role. 

What we are looking for

We are looking for a Staff Infrastructure Architect to own the infrastructure of our growing Reconciliation platform.You'll set the direction, architecture and design for our platform, focusing on performance, stability, security and how to integrate newer technologies. You will also be setting the technical direction and standards for our team while working alongside senior infrastructure engineers who own day-to-day execution and operational work.

This is a hands-on architecture role, not a pure strategy or management position. You'll write core foundational code and build reference implementations, but the bulk of routine implementation work belongs to the team. Your value is in judgment: knowing where to invest based on business direction, designing for scalability and lower long-term maintenance burden, and raising the technical ceiling of the team.

What you'll do:

• Set and own infrastructure architecture direction. Drive architecture, scalability, and performance decisions across the platform. 
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior infrastructure engineers by reviewing designs, unblocking hard problems, and playing a key role in deepening the team's expertise.
• Establish infrastructure standards and patterns for the team to create a high benchline for quality, performance and maintenance of the system.
• Stay hands-on: prototype, build critical-path components, and get into the code where it matters while routine implementation and day-to-day operational work is owned by the senior engineers.
• Make and be accountable for infrastructure tradeoff decisions with long-term cost, scalability, or maintainability implications.

What you'll bring:

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience designing and owning large-scale distributed infrastructure, including a track record of owning architecture decisions yourself, with 4+ years serving as a technical lead and mentoring engineers.
• Deep expertise with AWS & Kubernetes. Minimum 5+ years experience with each.
• Expertise in Linux and Windows server environments, with strong experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure on AWS and Azure.
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and ArgoCD, and scripting languages including Bash and Python.
• Experience with data infrastructure and processing technologies such as Spark and MSSQL. Experience building the systems that power high-volume transactional workloads, ideally in finance space. Cybersecurity experience is a plus.
• A track record of building infrastructure that scales, stays available, and remains secure, using Agile practices to ship reliably.

About you:

• You work openly and collaboratively with diverse teams, and you're energized by driving engineering excellence through better standards, processes, and shared knowledge.
• You welcome constructive feedback, actively inviting debate and rigorous discussion around your architectural ideas to deliver optimal outcomes.

This role is architecture-led, not implementation-led — we're looking for someone who has owned and been accountable for infrastructure design decisions, not someone whose primary experience is executing infrastructure designed by others. This is also a technical leadership role, not a people-management position.