Senior Staff Performance Engineer

Are you excited to solve the hardest performance challenges in distributed systems at scale? Do you enjoy diving deep into latency, concurrency, networking, and cross-region behavior to uncover opportunities for optimization and resilience? Are you motivated by influencing engineering strategy and building scalable performance practices that empower teams across an organization? If so, we invite you to be a part of our innovative team.

As a Senior Staff Performance Engineer at Ridgeline, you’ll lead critical initiatives focused on improving the performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency of our platform. You’ll partner closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineering teams to investigate complex system behaviors, define performance standards, and influence architectural decisions across distributed systems. Our team of engineers are building with cutting-edge technologies—like Claude Code and Cursor—in a fast-moving, creative, progressive work environment.

At Ridgeline, how we work matters as much as what we build. Ridgeliners act like owners, choose growth over comfort, and communicate with transparency. We assume positive intent, bias toward action, and bring solutions—not just problems. We celebrate wins, learn from setbacks, and thrive in a resilient, collaborative, high-performing culture.If this excites you, we’d love to meet you!

The impact you will have

• Lead deep performance investigations across distributed services, multi-region systems, and large-scale production environments

• Analyze latency, throughput, saturation, concurrency, and failure modes across data and control planes

• Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to optimize runtime behavior, networking efficiency, container orchestration, and resource utilization

• Define performance standards, benchmarking strategies, and system-level expectations across engineering organizations

• Influence architectural and technical decisions that improve scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency

• Design and evolve AI-assisted performance workflows that enable scalable, repeatable performance validation across systems and teams

• Develop scalable and cost-efficient performance testing frameworks that accurately model real-world customer workloads

• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through collaboration, coaching, and engineering leadership

• Drive a culture of ownership, transparency, continuous learning, and operational excellence

What we look for

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure

• Strong understanding of networking, concurrency, caching, replication, data structures, and scaling patterns

• Proven track record of identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in complex production environments

• Experience designing and executing performance testing strategies for highly distributed systems

• Expertise with observability, profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and performance analysis tools

• Strong systems-level thinking with the ability to balance reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency

• Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in highly cross-functional environments

• Willingness to learn and adopt cutting-edge technologies and AI-assisted engineering workflows

• An aptitude for solving ambiguous and highly complex technical challenges

• Serious interest in having fun at work

Bonus

• Experience optimizing cloud-native platforms running on Kubernetes or similar container orchestration systems

• Familiarity with performance engineering in financial technology or highly regulated industries

• Experience building AI-assisted engineering workflows or agent-driven validation systems

• Background working with multi-region architectures and globally distributed services

About Ridgeline

Ridgeline is the first front-to-back system of record for investment managers. Founded by visionary entrepreneur Dave Duffield (co-founder of both PeopleSoft and Workday), the company was created to modernize an industry held back by outdated, disconnected technology. Powered by a single, real-time data set and embedded AI, Ridgeline helps firms automate complexity, accelerate collaboration, and deliver tailored client experiences at scale, without added headcount or risk. Ridgeline is headquartered in Lake Tahoe, with offices in New York, Reno, and the Bay Area, and is recognized by Fast Company as a “Best Workplace for Innovators,” by Frost & Sullivan as a “Technology Innovation Leader,” and by The Software Report as a “Top 100 Software Company.”

Ridgeline is proud to be a community-minded, discrimination-free equal opportunity workplace.