Staff Performance Engineer

Are you passionate about building lightning-fast user experiences that scale across complex enterprise applications? Do you enjoy solving challenging frontend performance problems, optimizing client-server communication, and using data to drive measurable improvements? Are you excited to partner across engineering teams to define performance best practices and shape the technical direction of a modern web platform? If so, we invite you to join our innovative team.

As a Staff Performance Engineer at Ridgeline, you'll own the strategy for improving application performance across our modern investment management platform. You'll partner closely with product and platform engineering teams to optimize browser rendering, reduce inefficient service interactions, strengthen application observability, and improve the speed and reliability of mission-critical user workflows. You'll build scalable approaches for measuring and maintaining performance while helping establish engineering standards that enable teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our engineers build with cutting-edge technologies—including AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code and Cursor—in a fast-moving, creative, and collaborative 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

• Own and drive frontend performance strategy across complex React applications, improving responsiveness, scalability, and reliability.
• Analyze browser rendering behavior and optimize application performance across critical customer workflows.
• Identify inefficient API usage patterns, excessive client-server communication, and frontend performance bottlenecks.
• Measure, monitor, and improve real-user performance metrics across high-impact user experiences.
• Build and enhance tooling for browser instrumentation, synthetic testing, performance profiling, and client-side observability.
• Develop scalable approaches for performance monitoring, regression detection, and production diagnostics.
• Partner with product and platform engineering teams to optimize application architecture and establish frontend performance best practices.
• Lead investigations into complex production performance issues and drive root-cause resolution with urgency and ownership.
• Mentor engineers and influence technical decisions that raise the performance, quality, and maintainability of our frontend platform.
• Contribute to a collaborative engineering culture rooted in learning, teaching, and continuous improvement.

What we look for

• 8+ years of experience in frontend engineering, application engineering, or performance engineering.
• Strong understanding of browser rendering pipelines, JavaScript execution, and modern web performance optimization techniques.
• Experience building and optimizing applications with React or similar frontend frameworks.
• Experience analyzing network behavior, API interactions, caching strategies, and client-side performance bottlenecks.
• Familiarity with real-user monitoring, browser profiling, synthetic testing, and application observability tools.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in modern web application environments.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and influence engineering decisions across multiple teams.
• Passion for improving engineering practices through technical leadership, collaboration, and mentorship.
• Willingness to learn emerging technologies while developing expertise in complex business domains.
• Serious interest in having fun at work.

Bonus

• Experience building high-performance, data-intensive browser applications, such as analytics platforms, observability tools, trading systems, or real-time dashboards.
• Familiarity with modern client-side data and visualization technologies such as Apache Arrow, AG Grid, DuckDB-WASM, Perspective.js, D3, Vega/Vega-Lite, ECharts, or similar frameworks.
• Experience optimizing large-scale data rendering, virtualized tables, browser memory usage, and client-side compute performance.
• Experience with synthetic monitoring, browser automation, or frontend observability tooling.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or service-oriented applications.
• Experience improving performance in large-scale enterprise SaaS applications.
• Knowledge of Core Web Vitals, browser networking, accessibility, and frontend quality best practices.

About Ridgeline

Ridgeline is headquartered in Lake Tahoe, with offices in New York, Reno, the Bay Area, Dublin Ireland. Ridgeline 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.

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