Senior/Staff Engineer: AI-Driven High-Performance Systems

Riptide Search; Tampa (FL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Riptide Search is building a small, highly technical founding team to solve genuinely difficult engineering problems. You’ll design and ship high-throughput services that inspect live network traffic, terminate TLS in the data path, and maintain near-zero latency.

This role emphasizes ownership across the full stack—from idea to production—with AI tools and agents accelerating architecture, debugging, testing, and documentation while preserving correctness.

Qualifications

• 5–7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Proven ownership of systems from design through deployment and production operation.
• Hands-on experience with TLS, TLS termination, MITM/traffic inspection, or similar security‑sensitive network architectures.
• Strong experience building high‑throughput, low‑latency systems.
• Experience diagnosing and reducing p95/p99 tail latency.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, asynchronous processing, and streaming architectures.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Experience with React and TypeScript on the frontend.
• Deep knowledge of HTTP, TLS, gRPC/REST, networking concepts, and asynchronous/streaming I/O.
• Experience building observability, instrumentation, monitoring, and performance metrics.
• Experience designing systems for reliability, scalability, and failure recovery.
• Ability to independently turn ambiguous technical problems into production‑ready solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high‑throughput, low‑latency production services.
• Develop systems that inspect and analyze live network traffic.
• Work with TLS termination, interception/inspection, HTTP, gRPC/REST, and streaming protocols.
• Own features from architecture through production.
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks, including tail latency improvements.
• Build systems capable of operating under high concurrency and sustained load.
• Develop observability to prove latency, reliability, throughput, and system health.
• Diagnose complex production issues across distributed services.
• Harden systems against real‑world failures and edge cases.
• Establish technical direction for major functional areas.
• Collaborate across backend and frontend as needed.
• Use AI tools and agents as force multipliers throughout development.
• Mentor other engineers through technical judgment and execution.

Skills

5–7+ years experience

AI tools & agents

Ownership from design to production

TLS termination/inspection

High-throughput, low-latency

Tail latency optimization

Distributed systems

Go / Rust / TS/Node.js

React and TypeScript (frontend)

HTTP / TLS / gRPC / REST

Observability & metrics

Reliability & failure recovery

Ambiguity-to-production capability

Job description

Riptide Search is building a small, highly technical founding team to solve genuinely difficult engineering problems. You’ll design and ship high-throughput services that inspect live network traffic, terminate TLS in the data path, and maintain near-zero latency.

This role emphasizes ownership across the full stack—from idea to production—with AI tools and agents accelerating architecture, debugging, testing, and documentation while preserving correctness.