Staff Performance Engineer

Are you passionate about building lightning-fast user experiences that scale across complex enterprise applications? Do you enjoy uncovering hidden performance bottlenecks in frontend rendering, API interactions, and critical user workflows? Are you excited to partner across product and platform engineering teams to improve responsiveness, reliability, and real-world customer experience through data-driven optimization? If so, we invite you to be a part of our innovative team.

As a Performance Engineer at Ridgeline, you’ll improve application and frontend performance across our modern investment management platform by optimizing client-side behavior, measuring real-user experience, and strengthening application observability. You’ll work closely with engineering teams to analyze rendering pipelines, reduce inefficient service interactions, and improve the speed and responsiveness of mission-critical user journeys. 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

• Analyze frontend rendering behavior and optimize application responsiveness across complex workflows

• Identify inefficient API usage patterns, excessive client-server communication, and performance bottlenecks

• Measure and improve real-user performance metrics across critical customer experiences

• Build and enhance tools for synthetic testing, browser instrumentation, and client-side observability

• Partner with product engineering teams to improve the performance and reliability of high-impact user journeys

• Develop scalable approaches for performance profiling, monitoring, and regression detection

• Collaborate across engineering teams to establish frontend performance best practices and standards

• Investigate production performance issues and drive root-cause resolution with urgency and ownership

• Contribute to a collaborative environment rooted in learning, teaching, and transparency

What we look for

• 5+ years of experience in frontend engineering, application engineering, or performance engineering

• Strong understanding of browser rendering pipelines, frontend optimization techniques, and web performance fundamentals

• Experience building applications with React or similar frontend frameworks

• Familiarity with real-user monitoring, performance profiling, and observability tooling

• Experience analyzing network behavior, API interactions, and client-side performance bottlenecks

• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in modern web application environments

• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly across engineering and product teams

• Willingness to learn about cutting-edge technologies while cultivating expertise in a business domain/problem space

• An aptitude for problem solving

• Ability to communicate effectively

• Serious interest in having fun at work

Bonus

• Experience with synthetic monitoring or browser automation frameworks

• Familiarity with distributed systems or service-oriented architectures

• Experience improving performance in enterprise SaaS applications

• Knowledge of accessibility and frontend quality best practices

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.