Engineering Leader – AI & High-Performance Systems

Riptide Search; Tampa (FL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Riptide Search is seeking an engineering leader to build and lead a new, high‑performing team from the ground up. This role focuses on high‑throughput services that inspect live traffic at near‑zero latency and applied ML systems that run in the critical path.

You will define the team culture, standards, and operating principles, hire and mentor engineers, and own the team's delivery from architecture to production.

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of engineering leadership experience.
• Proven experience building, shipping, and operating production systems at scale.
• AI-native leadership with personal use of modern AI tools.
• Deep expertise in distributed and high-performance systems.
• Ability to recruit, hire, and retain top engineers.
• Experience collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers.
• Bias toward execution, reliability, and measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end team outcomes from architecture to production.
• Build the founding team of engineers and data scientists.
• Set technical standards, culture, and operating principles.
• Drive development of high-performance, low-latency systems.
• Collaborate with senior engineers to guide architecture decisions.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop technical leaders.
• Maintain reliability, performance, and production quality.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

High-throughput systems

Low-latency systems

AI-native leadership

Production systems

Recruiting & mentoring

Data science collaboration

Job description

Engineering Leader – AI & High-Performance Systems

The Opportunity

We’re looking for an exceptional engineering leader to build and lead a new, high‑performing engineering and data science team from the ground up.

This team will tackle genuinely difficult technical problems: building high‑throughput services that inspect live traffic at near‑zero latency and developing applied machine learning systems that operate directly in the critical path.

You’ll be joining at the beginning. There is no inherited team structure, engineering culture, or established technical bar — you will help define them. Who you hire, how you develop the team, and the engineering standards you establish will be among the most important early decisions.

This is a true player‑coach leadership role. You’ll remain close enough to the architecture, systems, and models to earn the trust of highly technical engineers while owning the larger outcome: Does the team ship? Does the technology perform at scale? Does it hold up in production?

Small team. Significant technical challenges. Huge opportunity to make an impact.

AI‑Native Leadership Is a Requirement

AI isn’t simply another tool in the stack. We are looking for a leader who knows how to use AI to fundamentally change the way engineering teams operate.

You should be able to demonstrate how you personally use AI to accelerate engineering work and, more importantly, how you build, hire, and coach teams that use AI as a force multiplier across the development lifecycle.

What You’ll Own

You’ll have end‑to‑end ownership of your team and its outcomes, including:

• Building the founding team of exceptional engineers and data scientists
• Establishing the team's technical standards, engineering culture, and operating principles
• Owning delivery from early architecture through production deployment and operation
• Partnering with senior engineers to make critical architecture and technical decisions
• Driving development of high‑performance, low‑latency production systems
• Helping guide the development and deployment of applied ML capabilities
• Creating clarity and execution plans when requirements or technical paths are ambiguous
• Establishing an AI‑native engineering culture where AI meaningfully increases team velocity and capability
• Recruiting, mentoring, and developing engineers into increasingly capable technical leaders
• Maintaining a high bar for reliability, performance, scalability, and production quality

You won’t simply manage the roadmap. You’ll be accountable for whether the technology actually works in production.

Who You Are

You’re a technical leader who leads from the front.

You’re hands‑on enough that strong engineers respect your technical judgment, but secure enough to give talented people genuine ownership.

You care deeply about building exceptional teams and understand that hiring is one of the most important responsibilities of an engineering leader. You would rather keep searching than lower the bar simply to fill a seat.

You develop people. Strong individual contributors become stronger engineers and future leaders under your direction.

You take ownership of results rather than explanations. When the path isn’t obvious, you create clarity. When something ships, you care just as much about how it performs in production as you did about getting it released.

And when it comes to engineering quality, “good enough” makes you uncomfortable.

What You Bring

• 8-10+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful experience leading technical teams
• Proven experience building, shipping, and operating production systems at scale
• Demonstrable AI‑native engineering leadership, including significant personal use of modern AI development tools and experience incorporating AI into engineering workflows
• Strong technical depth developed through hands‑on engineering experience
• The ability to go deep technically in distributed systems, high‑performance systems, machine learning, or related areas
• Experience working with high‑throughput and/or low‑latency architectures
• A strong track record of recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and retaining high‑performing engineers
• Experience leading or partnering closely with data scientists and machine learning engineers
• The ability to evaluate architecture, challenge technical assumptions, and guide difficult engineering decisions
• Experience owning ambiguous, high‑stakes initiatives from concept through production
• A strong bias toward execution, accountability, engineering quality, and measurable outcomes

Why This Role

This is an opportunity to build rather than inherit.

You’ll have the chance to shape the team, engineering culture, technical architecture, AI strategy, and operating standards from the beginning while working on systems where performance, scale, machine learning, and real‑time decision‑making intersect.

If you’re the kind of engineering leader who wants to build an exceptional technical organization while still staying close to the technology, this is that opportunity.