Principal Engineer

THE WORK:

RippleX is dedicated to empowering the builders of tomorrow on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), one of the world’s fastest and most reliable public blockchains. We believe in democratizing the digital economy by providing practical support, empowering a community of developers, and offering the expertise of a visionary technology company.

The XRPL is a decentralized, public blockchain led by a global community of businesses and developers looking to solve problems and create value. Proven reliable over more than a decade of operation and closing over 90 million ledger, the XRPL offers streamlined development, low transaction costs, high performance, and sustainability. We are looking for senior engineering talent to help us maintain this high technical bar, while building innovative solutions to ensure the XRPL can power the growing needs of the global digital economy. Ideal candidates will have a track record of defining a technical vision, but also developing the incremental path to get from here to there and bringing others along on the journey.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• You will lead teammates to develop and drive forward innovative architectural solutions to improve the XRP Ledger’s utility, performance, reliability, and security.
• You will be responsible for defining the corresponding future state system architecture and engineering best practices to support the ledger
• You will work across Ripple and the broader XRPL community to understand the needs of XRPL builders, and ensure we have a technical strategy to support them 
• You will work as a bridge between product and engineering, ensuring that we build where the sum is greater than the parts.
• You will define and orchestrate engineering forums that will elevate engineering standards, inspire engineers and enable continuous improvements.
• You are hands on and know what it takes to build highly available, scalable, distributed systems and you cherish every opportunity to share your experience and knowledge with the engineering community.
• You have an operator mindset. You understand the value of delivering incremental value and engineering fundamentals.
• Your strength lies in the ability to bring clarity to ambiguous situations and the ability to influence people at all levels and across organizations come natural to you.
• You keep an eye on the industry evolution in the blockchain and crypto world and ensure the XRPL is poised to meet the needs of blockchain developers.
• You love mentoring and providing guidance and assistance in the career development of others.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING:

• At least 12+ years’ experience in designing and developing complex distributed systems with at least 5+ years of experience contributing to large scale projects as an architect or as a key individual contributor.
• Expert-level experience in C++ is required. 
• Experience developing and evolving distributed systems (e.g., consensus algorithms, networking, fault tolerance, observability)
• Experience with blockchain technology and protocols, and traditional financial systems and concepts.
• Experience crafting or contributing to the multi-year engineering roadmap of open source software.
• Experience in mentoring and growing engineers at all levels, and setting up best practices and processes for them and the company to succeed.
• Have prior experience leading software evaluation and decision making processes. 
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and experience presenting to broad audiences and to senior leadership.