Director of Engineering leaves Ripple

Director of Engineering at Ripple, Nik Bougalis, is leaving the company after 10 years. Ripple’s new VP of Engineering is refreshing the technical leadership at the company and moving development to Toronto.

Alex Harutunian

Oct 23, 2022 - 1 min read

Long serving Director of Engineering at Ripple, Nik Bougalis, is leaving the company. He posted his decision on his Twitter account, adding that he was not planning on joining any crypto project/company, or be involved NFT or DeFi.

“All good things…”

My decade-long journey at @Ripple has been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one.

I got to work on a project that I love, towards a goal I believe in.

But that journey will be coming to an end in a few weeks.

🧵
— 𝙽 𝙸 𝙺 𝙱 (@nbougalis) October 21, 2022

Director of Engineering is the third highest technical position in Ripple after the founding CTO David Schwartz and VP of Engineering Devraj Varadhan. Devraj joined Ripple in 2021 after working 11 years at Amazon.

Nik Bougalis is the third in the line of top technical staff leaving Ripple in 2022. Previously RippleNet General Manager Asheesh Birla and Director of Developer Relations Matt Hamilton, versed team members, left the company without any visible career move. Now, both were among the few colleagues that commented on Nik Bougalis’s post and acknowledged his contribution to the company.

The changes to the technical leadership may be the elements of Ripple’s new VP’s course for more customer facing products and “operational rigor”. In August this year Devraj proudly opened a new development hub in Toronto, Canada, moving most of the technical staff there.

XRP was trading around $0.4 mark, at its 2018-2019 levels, at the time of writing. Ripple Labs is also facing a legal action from SEC on its investment practices.