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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Staff Software Engineer - **Company:** Ripple - **Location:** United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $212,000.0 - $265,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Software Quality, Code Review, Information Engineering, Data Systems, Python (Programming Language), SQL Databases, Systems Integration, Large Language Models, Apache Spark, Data Lakes, Data Management, Databricks - **Published:** September 4, 2026 - **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/staff-software-engineer-data-engineering-ripple-8593869 ## About the Role * 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 - Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark - with the judgment to make platform-level decisions and the skill to implement them. * 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, and lifting the quality of everyone around you. * Experience driving AI tooling into data engineering workflows - building agentic systems, integrating LLMs into developer workflows, or enabling conversational analytics. * The ability to influence through technical credibility and translate tradeoffs for both engineers and leadership. ## Description * 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, and stay hands-on shipping production flows, writing the reference implementations, and prototyping the hard parts before the team scales them. * Establish the benchmark for data quality and governance - expectations, data contracts, lineage, validation frameworks - and hold the team to it 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. This includes agentic systems for pipeline operations, automated transformation generation, and self-serve analytics interfaces. Develop the first versions yourself. * Act as the quality standard bearer: raise code quality, build rigor, and engineering judgment across the team, and mentor senior engineers into greater ownership., * 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 of the team. * In-office collaboration for moments that matter is important to our culture, and we give managers and teams the flexibility to decide which 10+ days a month they come in. * Bi-weekly all-company meeting - business updates and ask me anything style discussion with our Leadership Team * We come together for moments that matter which include team offsites, team bonding activities, happy hours and more! ## Related Videos - [Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/608-throwing-off-the-burdens-of-scale-in-engineering) - [Are Code Reviews Worth It? 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