Software Engineer (Python) - LS

Ripjar is a UK-based software company that uses data and machine learning technologies to help companies and governments prevent financial crimes and terrorism.

Ripjar was formed in 2013 by ex-GCHQ Data Scientists and now has 140 staff based across offices in Cheltenham, Bristol, London, New York, and Canberra (as well as remote). We have two successful, inter-related products; Labyrinth Screening and Labyrinth Intelligence.

Labyrinth Screening allows companies to monitor their customers or suppliers for entities which they aren’t allowed to, or do not want to do business with (for regulatory, ethical or environmental reasons). Labyrinth Intelligence empowers organisations to perform deep investigations into varied datasets to find interesting patterns and relationships.

Data infuses everything Ripjar does. We work with a wide variety of datasets of all scales, including an always-growing archive of 10 billion news articles in (nearly!) every language in the world going back over 30 years, sanctions and watchlist data provided by governments, 250M organisations and ownership data from global corporate registries.

Ripjar’s Labyrinth Screening products have Identity at their core - who is who? - is this person who wants to open a bank account the same person as the leader of that narcotics trafficking ring? Is this company the same as the one involved in a widespread fraud case?

Team mission

Our engineering team builds software that makes the world a safer place. We work collectively to use technology, creativity and engineering best practice to solve problems that nobody else can.

What you'll be doing

As a Software Engineer in the Identity Team, you will work closely with data scientists, software engineers and product managers to enhance and support Ripjar’s identity-matching engine. Our best-in-class, highly configurable matching engine can match names and identities across a multitude of languages and scripts.

In this role, you will use Python and MongoDB daily, with additional exposure to Node.js/Typescript, Redis, Kafka and Elasticsearch depending on the task. We use Github, Github Actions, Jira and Confluence as support tools.

Key Tasks

Your contributions as part of the Identity Team will include:

• Building new features, capabilities and component configurations
• Optimising performance and the end-to-end processing of identity data
• Building tooling to test and report the runtime and statistical performance characteristics
• Automating and streamlining the delivery of software and deliverables
• Maintaining and managing data migrations on Ripjar’s SaaS systems
• Integrating and adapting Ripjar’s identity-matching engine to help solve novel problems and generate new product opportunities for Ripjar

Key Skills

Ripjar values engineers who are thoughtful and thorough problem solvers and who can learn new technologies, ideas, codebases, and paradigms quickly. Your ability to understand and get to the heart of complex systems is more important to us than the specific technical skills you possess.

We do, however, expect you to have:

• Commercial experience in a software engineering team, using version control and Linux operating systems
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, with a strong preference for Python. If Python is not your primary language, a sound understanding and familiarity with Python is expected
• Experience working with databases such as MongoDB
• Experience engineering within and supporting complex software systems

The following would be beneficial, but not strictly necessary:

• Experience with the technologies mentioned above (Elasticsearch, Node.js, Kafka, Redis)
• A STEM degree
• Experience working with data scientists, predictive/probabilistic systems, or large volumes of data
• Experience in scaling a SaaS platform using systems like Kubernetes