Staff Engineer - Labyrinth Screening

Ripjar was founded by veterans of GCHQ to bring national security-grade intelligence tools to the fight against financial crime. Financial crime funds human trafficking, terrorism, corruption and sanctions evasion on a global scale, and the organisations on the front line need technology built to match the threat.

Today, Ripjar's AI-native software and data fusion products are used by governments, the world's largest banks, and global enterprises to automate the detection, investigation and monitoring of serious financial crime. Every day, hundreds of customers and thousands of daily active users rely on the platform to screen hundreds of millions of names for risk in real time, prevent money laundering and stop terrorist financing.

If you want your work to matter, this is where it happens.

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.

Our customers – including global financial institutions, corporations and technology 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 Compliance Copilot.

What you'll be doing:

Staff Engineers at Ripjar are experts in one or more technology domains within Ripjar’s product set. You’ll be working on the Labyrinth Screening SaaS platform which has over 120 businesses using it around the world and growing rapidly. This requires exceptional technical knowledge, good leadership skills, and a deep understanding of software design and development principles.

Staff engineers will collaborate within and across engineering teams, working closely with engineering managers and other technical stakeholders to guide sound technical decisions and provide oversight for the teams they support. They also partner with senior technical leaders to shape Ripjar’s overall technology roadmap. 

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 trade-offs, communicating with engineers, technology and product leaders, senior leadership and customers. You will be able to influence the engineering teams to adopt new ideas and embrace them.

Your initial primary task is anticipated to be scaling our SaaS platform to handle many more companies, data feeds, data items and users. Driving the necessary changes to our architecture, testing, processes and culture to achieve this.

Key Tasks:

• Own the software design and technology for a technical area of Labyrinth Screening.
• Collaborate with the wider engineering teams, technology, product leaders and customers to establish requirements, design and deliver high quality software.
• Incorporate engineering principles and methodologies into the broader organisational decision-making process to ensure problem definition, solution development and quality assurance are effectively integrated into our business outcomes.
• Take a leading role in Labyrinth Screening’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.

The successful candidate should have these skills:

•  You have deep and broad experience in building and designing software: you are an engineer and technical leader.
• You have experience working with big data or large scale data processing systems.

• Concrete knowledge and experience of software design patterns, industry best practices and architecture design.
• Demonstrated expertise in deploying software into production environments
• You have experience designing distributed systems that manage extensive data and/or workloads.
• You can quickly comprehend complex scenarios, unravel uncertainty and ambiguity and articulate the architecture of complex systems.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and engage wider technical teams to drive internal growth and career progression.
• You can communicate clearly - written, verbal, and visually - in the right level of detail for any audience.

Technical Skills:

• Expertise in Software Engineering
• Strong working knowledge of one or more of our tech stack, these include: JavaScript, ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, EKS and Kubernetes.
• Experience with microservices architectures
• Demonstrable experience in scaling a SaaS platform is highly desirable – particularly around evolving and improving a system architecture

Why we think you’ll enjoy it here:

• Competitive base salary DOE
• 25 days annual leave + birthdays off, rising to 30 days after 5 years of service & Christmas shutdown.
• Fully remote working
• 35 hour working week
• Flexible working hours.
• Private Family Healthcare
• Life Assurance
• Pension salary sacrifice
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Company contributions to your pension
• Enhanced maternity/paternity pay
• The latest tech including a top of the range MacBook Pro
• There is a well-stocked pantry with food, snacks and drinks when in the office