Principal Engineer

Description

Ripjar specialises in the development of software and data products that help governments and organisations combat serious financial crime. Our technology is used to identify criminal activity such as money laundering and terrorist financing, and enables organisations to enforce sanctions at scale to help combat rogue entities and state actors.

We are a remote first team, with a head office based in Cheltenham. This position is open to UK wide candidates. If you are based near Cheltenham, you are more than welcome to work from our office at any time.

Team Mission

Ripjar's Engineering team builds software products that make the world safer. We work together, mixing creativity with technology and engineering excellence to solve problems that nobody else can.

What we build

Our Labyrinth Intelligence platform provides users with cutting-edge tools for data ingest, analysis and visualisation, powered by built-in AI, a first-class RPA workflow engine and world-leading data security model.

Global financial institutions, corporations and big tech companies rely on our Labyrinth Screening product to monitor millions of client records, counterparties and prospects for sanctions, AML/CTF and other risks against billions of data points in near-real time.

Ripjar's unique approach to name and adverse media screening – using AI risk profiles – provides our customers with world leading capability, recognised by Chartis as a Category Leader in KYC Solutions. We continue to innovate at pace the compliance sector, pioneering the responsible use of AI with our Digital Assistant.

What you'll be doing

As a Principal Engineer, you'll provide technology leadership and architectural oversight to our product and platform engineering teams. As a senior technologist you'll be central to Ripjar's technical leadership. You'll report directly to the CTO.

• You'll work closely with senior leaders and colleagues across the organisation, and you'll play a key role in collaborating with our customers and partners.
• As an engineer with breadth and depth of experience you'll be in your element designing and delivering scalable software in the cloud and on-premise, articulating software designs and tradeoffs, communicating with engineers, technology and product leaders, senior leadership and customers.
• You're a key individual contributor and natural technical leader, comfortable guiding engineering teams through uncertainty, unravelling complexity and providing a clear vision. You'll work with our engineering managers and staff/senior engineers to empower engineers to deliver high quality software
• You'll play a leading role in shaping our technology priorities. You'll also be actively engaged with our product team, and you'll engage with product managers and key customers to understand their needs and develop an effective combined product and technology roadmap.

Key Tasks:

• Architectural oversight of Ripjar's software platforms.
• Leading contribution to product design and development.
• Empowering Staff and Senior engineers to own key elements of the product and architecture.
• Empowering technology and product leaders and teams to design and deliver high quality software products.
• Take a leading role in Ripjar's engineering organisation: contributing to standards, design patterns and technology approaches across our technical teams.
• Ensure consistent application of architectural decisions and guidelines across Ripjar's software products.

Requirements

Key Skills

The successful candidate should have these skills:

• You have deep and broad experience in building and designing software: you are an engineer and a natural technical leader. As a guideline, you'll have at least 10 years' experience building software.
• You have proven experience developing distributed data-intensive systems and running them in production.
• You have experience deploying software both into the cloud and on-premise.
• You've built production systems based on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, MongoDB and/or Apache Kafka.
• You have a good understanding of DevOps fundamentals.
• You have proven experience introducing and implementing change.
• You can quickly comprehend complex scenarios, unravel uncertainty and ambiguity and articulate the architecture of complex systems.
• You can communicate clearly - written, verbal, and visually - in the right level of detail for any audience.

Bonus Skills

• Expertise in Javascript or Python.
• Experience with microservices architectures.
• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Domain experience in National Security, cyber security or financial crime compliance.
• You have previous experience within a scaling business.
• You have experience with large scale data processing systems or working with data at scale.

Benefits

Why we think you'll enjoy it here:

• Competitive base salary up to 140k.
• 25 days annual leave + your birthday off rising to 30 days after 5 years of service
• Remote working
• Life assurance
• Pension salary sacrifice
• Private Family Healthcare
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Company contributions to your pension
• Enhanced maternity/paternity pay
• The latest tech including a top of the range MacBook Pro
• Offices equipped with well-stocked pantries with food, snacks and drinks when in the office