Ripple Street

Your role in one sentence

You'll design, build, and own the systems behind Ripple Street, and use AI to change both how we build and what we build.

Who you are

• You want the whole problem, not the ticket. You would rather understand why we are building something than be handed a spec and a date. When “build this” is not the right answer, you say so early, and you bring a better one.

• You are curious about the business, not just the system. You want to know who is on the other side of the screen: the consumer opening a product for the first time, the brand watching a campaign go live, our internal stakeholders. That context changes the code you write.

• You are AI-native in how you work. You use AI for the repetitive work so your time goes to reasoning and judgment, and you have a clear sense of where it helps and where it quietly makes things worse.

• You write things down. Decisions, trade-offs, the reason the obvious approach did not work. You document as you build, so the next person, or the next model, can pick up the work without you in the room.

• You are steady when the architecture is not obvious. Data modeling, throughput, latency, cost. You have sat with a problem that had no clean answer and shipped something you could defend afterward.

• You make the engineers around you better. You review honestly and generously. You share what you have figured out before anyone asks for it.

• You believe in being in the room. We are on-site five days a week in Bengaluru. A team being built from the ground up learns faster in the same room: more feedback, more overheard context, more decisions made in ten minutes instead of two days.

Why this role exists

Ripple Street is built on something brands cannot manufacture: real people, using real products, telling real people about it. Behind that is a platform, the one that matches consumers to brand experiences and runs the campaigns, events, and sampling programs that put products into their hands.

That platform is entering its next chapter, and we are building the engineering team that will carry it. This is one of the first senior seats on that team. The systems you design, the standards you hold, and the way you decide this team works will still be visible years from now.

We are also rebuilding around AI in earnest. Not as a feature we bolt on, but in how we build: what gets automated, what gets documented, and where a senior engineer actually spends their day. For a small team that is a genuine advantage, and it changes the job in ways worth being honest about. Less mechanical work. More judgment.

So this is a builder role with high autonomy and a high bar. Direct access to leadership, short decision chains, no layers between you and the work. What we ask in return is ownership: take the problem, shape it, ship it, and run it.

What you'll actually do

Own problems end to end

• Take a problem from framing to production: design it, ship it, and run it

• Work the open-ended ones where the right architecture is not obvious, and make the call on data modeling, throughput and latency trade-offs, and cost

• Help decide what gets built and why, alongside leadership, rather than receiving the decision

Build and operate the platform

• Build and run backend services in Java and Spring Boot, our core stack

• Build front-end experiences in React, React Native, and TypeScript

• Operate on AWS against MySQL and PostgreSQL, with real ownership of what you put in production

Make AI part of the craft

• Use AI tooling to build, test, document, and maintain, with sound judgment about when it is the right answer and when it is not

• Write the documentation and context, including ADRs, that let both people and AI pick up the work cleanly

• Bring back what you learn, so the way the whole team works gets sharper rather than just your own

Raise the bar around you

• Take part in design and code reviews, and hold a standard other engineers can learn from

• Automate the manual and operational work instead of absorbing it

• Partner directly with leadership, operations, and the rest of engineering

What you'll need to do this job well

The core

• Five or more years of professional engineering, with senior-level ownership. Not five years of tickets. Systems you were responsible for after they shipped.

• Strong backend experience in Java and Spring Boot. This is our core stack, and you should be genuinely fluent in it.

• Real comfort across the front end. React, React Native, and TypeScript. You do not have to be a specialist, but you should be able to carry a feature all the way to the screen.

• Hands-on AWS and relational databases. MySQL or PostgreSQL, in production, with the operational scars that come with it.

• Day-to-day use of modern AI tooling in your engineering work. Practical and current, not a weekend experiment.

• Clear communication. You can explain a complex system simply, to technical and non-technical people alike. Most decisions here happen in a conversation before they happen in code.

What will stand out

• Cloud architectures you designed, not only consumed

• Event-driven work: Lambda and SQS, OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, Redis or ElastiCache

• Infrastructure-as-code, or an interest in helping us establish it

• A startup or founding-engineer background, where autonomy was the default rather than the perk

• A track record of automating manual or operational work out of existence

• Familiarity with consumer engagement, campaigns, or community and event platforms; open-source contributions; public technical writing

Logistics

• Location: Bengaluru, India. On-site five days a week.

• Employment type: Full-time

• Reports to: Venkateswarlu Abburi