Ripple Employee Spotlight: Raghu Battula, Sr. Director of Engineering

2018-6-17 12:50

Ripple’s growth and success can be attributed to the hard work of the bright and driven people that work at the company.

The engineering team at Ripple has been critical to creating solutions to improve cross-border payments, and with the recent addition of Raghu Battula, the Senior Director of Engineering, the team will be positioned to drive further innovation in the global payments space.

In this Employee Spotlight, Battula details why he joined the company and what he’s looking forward to the most in his role at Ripple.

Q: What brought you to Ripple?

Raghu Battula: There’s been a lot of innovation in the digital economy and you see a lot of cool things happening from an end-consumer perspective.

There has also been a lot of innovation in the domestic-payment space, but sending cross-border payments real time is still an area that needs innovation and is a tough problem to solve.

After meeting with Brad Garlinghouse (CEO) and hearing his vision, it became very clear to me that Ripple is doing something really amazing. In fact, this will be the most transformative work I’ve ever done in my life and feel honored to be part of this journey.

Q: What has been the most surprising thing about working at Ripple?

RB: The most surprising thing has been the shift in mindset that corporations and financial institutions have had and their willingness to adopt our technology and product solutions. It has been extremely surprising in a really good way. I’m very excited about that.

Customers are very eager to adopt our technology and use our solutions. They see the value in what we’re doing.

Additionally, the people we have are very smart and very humble, and they live by our values and it’s great to see that.

Q: Tell us about your greatest achievement in your career, so far.

RB: When I look back in my career, I like to think that the sum of all parts is greater than the individual piece. However, for me, the greatest achievement has been to have worked at technology companies like Intuit, Paypal and Apple.

At each company, I was part of teams that created innovative, customer-facing products, such as mobile wallets, financial platforms, and consumer and enterprise apps. But, if I had to pick one, the work I did at Intuit was the most exciting. I built the engineering organization that built the financial data platform for Intuit. Products like Mint, Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax all use this platform on a daily basis which connects to thousands of financial institutions.

It’s a very high-transaction processing system. We worked with banking customers, as well. That’s how I have been exposed to the banking world.

Q: What are Engineering’s three key priorities for 2018, and what do they mean for all of Team Ripple?

RB: The No.1 goal is to make sure we rapidly scale out RippleNet and the core products behind it — xVia, xCurrent, and xRapid — to meet our enterprise customers’ needs and provide a frictionless experience. We’re building this out in a way that’s highly scalable, fast and reliable for our customers.

No.2 is to hire a lot of smart people. I’m looking to hire engineers who have built scalable financial systems.

No.3 is the culture, as we’re growing rapidly, it’s important to make sure we continue to live our core values that make up the larger Ripple family. From an engineering perspective, this means we’ll continue to have a fast-paced culture and rapid innovation in the blockchain space and try new ideas.

Q: What challenge are you most excited to tackle this year?

RB: We have exciting challenge(s) on the architecture and design side. It will feel like we’re building the runway while the plane is taking off because as we’re doing this we’re getting more and more requirements. At the same time, we’re building out a highly scalable RippleNet platform that will benefit our customers.

We need to make sure that we continue to focus on providing a frictionless experience for our customers. It’s a technical challenge but this is what we’re looking forward to in engineering.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about engineering from non-engineers?

RB: In my experience, the biggest misconception is that sometimes non-engineers have a tendency to define a solution rather than define a problem.

My recommendation is to give an opportunity for engineers to walk in the customers’ shoes and pose the “problem definition” to engineers and allow them to ask more questions. This allows engineers to come up with a better solution and also solve a set of problem(s) that a non-engineer may not have asked the engineer to solve.

Q: What’s the most fun part of the job?

RB: The fun part of my job is seeing our products being used by our customers. In engineering, we come up with innovative-, problem-solving products and solutions, and what makes my day is when customers use our products and love it. When customers love our products that makes engineers very happy!

Also, working at Ripple is really fun. It’s not just work, work, work, we have a lot of social events. For example, we have wine clubs, yoga clubs, soccer matches, a lot of team activities, I could go on.

Q: If Ripple employees want to learn more about the engineering team and the work you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

RB: They can start by reaching out to me, we’re going to schedule a lot of meetups and publish more engineering-focused blogs and more. All of the blogs will be published on Ripple’s website soon. This is an area where we can improve and I want people to reach out to us and understand what we’re doing.

For more information about open engineering positions, please visit our Careers page.

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