Senior Director, Security Engineering

The Work

As the Senior Director of Security Engineering, you will be responsible for building and leading a dedicated, humble, and paranoid team of Security Engineers to secure Ripple's products, infrastructure, and corporate IT systems. You will play a substantial role in defining the security strategy and encouraging a culture of security across the entire company. Your leadership will be crucial in protecting our business and our customers by embedding security into every layer of our technology stack.

This is a hands-on role and requires a deep understanding of technology. AI is fundamentally reshaping how we build software and how our tools and systems operate, and this role sits at the center of that challenge. You will ensure our use of AI tooling and agentic workflows is secure, controlled, and auditable.

What you'll do

• Set the strategic vision and roadmap for the Security Engineering team, focusing on product security, infrastructure security, and IT security, with a particular focus on AI security, including agentic guardrails and AI-assisted development risk.
• Serve as a security domain expert, providing guidance and communicating security risks and concepts to senior leadership, engineering teams, and other partners.
• Define guardrails around AI agents and tools operating within Ripple's environment, including scope boundaries, blast radius limits, and rollback mechanisms.
• Implement and enforce agentic SDLC guardrails, testing gates, and human oversight of AI-assisted development workflows.
• Lead, mentor, and strengthen a team of security engineers, cultivating an atmosphere that values technical excellence, continual learning, and innovation.
• Drive the implementation of security guidelines across the engineering organization, ensuring security is integrated into day-to-day development processes.
• Lead security architecture reviews for new products, infrastructure changes, and major engineering initiatives, serving as a formal checkpoint before systems go to production.
• Own the vulnerability management program, including coordinating penetration testing, prioritizing remediation, and partnering with engineering teams to close risk at pace.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and IT leadership to ensure alignment on security priorities and to champion security outcomes on behalf of our customers.

What You'll Bring

• 15+ years of experience in security engineering, with at least 5+ years in a leadership or management role, preferably in the crypto, blockchain, or FinTech space.
• Hands-on expertise in AI security: a clear understanding of the risk surface introduced by LLMs, AI agents, and AI-assisted development workflows, and how to build guardrails around them.
• Expert-level knowledge of security architecture, including cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), modern application stacks, and network security.
• Strong understanding of cryptographic principles, secure coding practices, and common web and blockchain vulnerabilities (e.g., OWASP Top 10).
• Experience with authentication and authorization standards (OAuth, SAML, OIDC) and their security implications.
• Demonstrated expertise in IT security, including endpoint protection, network security, identity and access management (IAM), and corporate security policy enforcement.
• Hands-on experience with threat modeling methodologies and risk identification techniques.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and security risks to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A track record of fostering a positive security culture within an organization and proven experience leading and building a high-performing security team.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to effectively and creatively manage complex security challenges.