Senior/Staff Software Engineer – High-Performance Systems & AI

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

Senior/Staff Software Engineer – High-Performance Systems & AI

The Opportunity

We’re building a small, highly technical founding team to solve genuinely difficult engineering problems.

You’ll design and build high-throughput services that inspect live network traffic, terminate and analyze TLS directly in the data path, and maintain near-zero latency while doing it.

This is real systems engineering: streaming, distributed systems, networking, security, performance optimization, and latency-sensitive architecture. This is not another CRUD application sitting behind a web form.

You also won't be starting from scratch. You'll inherit real infrastructure and real users, which means the systems you build can reach production in weeks rather than years. Your work will have immediate visibility and measurable impact.

This is an environment for engineers who want ownership, difficult technical problems, and the ability to shape how a platform evolves.

AI-Native Engineering Is a Requirement

AI isn't simply another development tool here.

We're looking for engineers who have fundamentally changed how they build software by incorporating AI tools and agents throughout the engineering lifecycle.

You should be able to demonstrate how you use AI to accelerate architecture, development, debugging, testing, documentation, and problem-solving — while maintaining the technical judgment necessary to determine whether the output is actually correct.

What You’ll Own

You’ll own capabilities from initial idea through production operation.

That means designing the architecture, building the system, shipping it, instrumenting it, and making sure it continues to perform under real-world traffic and failure conditions.

Responsibilities include:

• Design and build high-throughput, low-latency production services
• Develop systems that inspect and analyze live network traffic
• Work directly with TLS termination, interception/inspection, HTTP, gRPC/REST, and streaming protocols
• Own features and capabilities from architecture through production
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks, including p95/p99 tail latency
• Build systems capable of operating reliably under high concurrency and sustained load
• Develop the observability necessary to prove latency, reliability, throughput, and system health
• Diagnose complex production issues across distributed services
• Harden systems against real-world failures, unusual traffic patterns, and security-sensitive edge cases
• Establish technical direction for major functional areas
• Work across backend and frontend systems when necessary
• Use AI tools and agents as force multipliers throughout development
• Mentor and influence other engineers through technical judgment and execution

You won't simply own tickets.

You'll own outcomes.

Who You Are

You're the engineer who sees something that needs to exist and starts figuring out how to build it.

You don't need every requirement documented before moving. You can take an ambiguous technical problem, define it, break it down, and create a path toward production.

You naturally gravitate toward the hardest and least-defined parts of the system.

You lead through technical judgment and execution rather than title. Other engineers trust your direction because you've demonstrated that you can solve difficult problems and deliver systems that actually work.

You also understand that shipping isn't the finish line.

If something behaves incorrectly in production, you consider that your problem. You care about how the system performs under real traffic, real load, and real failure conditions, not simply whether it passed testing.

When you encounter a protocol, architecture, or failure mode you've never seen before, you learn it quickly and keep moving.

And “good enough” makes you uncomfortable.

What You Bring

• 5–7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Demonstrable experience using AI development tools and agents as a meaningful engineering force multiplier
• Proven ownership of systems from design and architecture 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
• Strong command of at least one modern backend language such as Go, Rust, or TypeScript/Node.js
• Experience with React and TypeScript on the frontend
• Deep working knowledge of HTTP, TLS, gRPC/REST, networking concepts, and asynchronous/streaming I/O
• Experience building meaningful observability, instrumentation, monitoring, and performance metrics
• Experience designing systems for reliability, scalability, and failure recovery
• Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills in complex production environments
• The ability to independently take ambiguous technical problems and turn them into production-ready solutions

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Experience building network security, traffic inspection, proxy, gateway, firewall, or cybersecurity platforms
• Deep experience with TLS interception and encrypted traffic inspection
• Experience optimizing systems where microseconds or milliseconds materially impact the product
• Experience with very high-volume streaming or event-driven architectures
• Strong knowledge of network protocols and application-layer traffic
• Experience building or operating performance-critical Go or Rust services
• Demonstrated examples of using AI agents or AI-assisted development workflows to significantly increase engineering output

Why This Role

This is an opportunity to work on engineering problems where performance actually matters.

You’ll be working at the intersection of networking, cybersecurity, distributed systems, streaming architecture, applied AI, and high-performance software engineering.

You’ll have real users, real traffic, and real production constraints from the beginning — while still having the freedom and influence that comes with joining a small founding team.

If you want to build systems where shaving latency, understanding protocols, solving difficult production problems, and pushing the limits of what's technically possible are part of the job, you'll feel at home here.