How to Land a High-Paying Job at Top Crypto Startup Ripple

LinkedIn said titles with “bitcoin,” “ethereum,” “blockchain,” and “cryptocurrency” rose 395% in 2021.
Ripple is hiring senior blockchain software engineers at a base pay range of $146,000 to $201,000.
Its hiring manager said candidates should “thrive in ambiguity” and be entrepreneurial.

Ripple, a $15 billion crypto cross-border-payments platform, has more than 200 open job listings in the US, the UK, Singapore, Canada, and India. This comes as hiring among crypto and blockchain startups has skyrocketed amid the industry’s boom.

Between 2020 and 2021, job titles containing the words “bitcoin,” “ethereum,” “blockchain,” and “cryptocurrency” increased by 395% in the US, according to LinkedIn and Crypto Advisor data. The US was responsible for 40% of open blockchain job postings worldwide, the data showed. The hiring is fueled by venture investors, who poured a total of $30 billion into crypto and blockchain startups last year, according to PitchBook data.

As of January, Ripple had raised about $318 million, according to PitchBook, and was valued at $15 billion, its CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, said in a tweet. At least, that’s the valuation based on the share price Ripple paid to buy back stock from its October Series C investors, led by Tetragon and joined by SBI Holdings and Route 66 Ventures. That $200 million round in late 2019 valued the company at $10 billion, it said at the time.

So Garlinghouse’s tweet implied his board paid a handsome profit to those investors for those shares. He also tweeted that the company had $1 billion “in the bank.”

The buyback came shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing it of selling $1.3 billion worth of unlicensed securities in December. Ripple is fighting the suit, and some industry observers say it may be settled later this year.

Ripple is, meanwhile, plowing ahead with its hiring plans. And as one of the most highly valued crypto startups, its head of talent has seen a surprising trend among its job candidates.

“We’ve seen an influx of candidates leaving traditional Wall Street and large technology companies to join crypto,” Jim Chauncey-Kelly, Ripple’s vice president of global talent acquisition, told Insider.

As a quickly growing industry, blockchain has a lot of room for anyone interested in building products and services to be of influence for the larger community, Chauncey-Kelly said.

The company wants to hire candidates who have an interest in blockchain, have an entrepreneurial spirit, and “thrive in ambiguity,” he said, which covers both the company’s legal battles and the industry’s quickly changing landscape.

He shared one key to winning an offer: “It’s clear when candidates are curious and do their research before the interview process,” he said. “They are proactive and ask question after question.”

He said the company was also seeking a diverse workforce and tried to “have a minimum of two underrepresented candidates interviewed” for every open role.

To shed light on what Ripple pays, Insider gathered pay data from work-visa applications the company filed with the US government in 2021. Companies must disclose salary information when applying for visas, and pay must be the same as a US citizen would get paid for the same job. The data excludes stock compensation, which can significantly increase total pay. Still, it gives insight into how much Ripple pays key positions, such as software engineers and data scientists.