Systems engineering for software that has to hold up under real traffic.
Rayder Systems is a software systems consulting practice. Runtime and performance, distributed systems and async Rust, production reliability and incident forensics, and the agent and evaluation infrastructure behind AI tooling. Every change is verified against a reference, so a faster or simpler system provably behaves the same.
Practice
- Performance & runtime
- Find the hot paths, move the ones that matter into native code, and fix the memory layout underneath. p95 and request volume drop; the output still matches the reference.
- Distributed systems & async Rust
- Peer-to-peer sync, request/response protocols, backpressure, timeouts, and per-peer retry, with the transport observability to see what is actually happening on the wire.
- Production reliability & forensics
- Deadlocks, async stalls, and runaway memory under real load. Diagnosed with thread stacks, futex waits, and dump hooks, then closed out with the fix, a watchdog, and a test that reproduces the failure.
- Runtime, VM & compiler
- Custom VMs, C-runtime integration, compiler and interpreter parity, single-allocation deserialization, memory-mapped state. Native fast paths that stay bit-for-bit faithful to the reference.
- AI agent & evaluation infrastructure
- Long-running agent harnesses: supervisors, heartbeats, an append-only event bus, multi-model fan-out, and grading against a reference.
- Technical due diligence
- A hard read of the code, architecture, dependencies, delivery risk, and execution quality, returned as written tradeoffs you can act on.
Selected work
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Zorpproduction blockchain node · Rust
Peer-to-peer sync, runtime state migration, and async reliability on a production node. Every change verified against a reference; migration output hashed bit-for-bit identical.
p95 round-trip −60% state migration −76% sync requests −61% Async stalls traced to overloaded responders and fixed with bounded queues and watchdogs, plus a stress harness that reproduces the failure.
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TlonVere · Urbit's C runtime
- Built the khan and conn IPC drivers and the noun wire protocol across the kernel/runtime line; batched event-log replay on the boot path; wrote Nock jets matched exactly to the interpreter.
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VaporwareUrbit · Hoon backend
- Token-gated software distribution: a chain-log scanner, an ERC-1155 and account-event parser, an ownership store, and an update stream for the apps on top.
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EarlierML · data systems
- Fraud-detection ML in production at Feedzai; Elixir/Erlang healthcare data at Cota; Scala/Spark data platforms at Owl Analytics, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.
Approach
- Direct technical diagnosis: what is actually wrong, not what is easiest to say.
- Clear written tradeoffs you can act on.
- Changes verified against a reference: differential runs, deterministic A/B, bit-identical state hashes where it matters.
- Focused delivery on agreed scope.
- Handoff notes that make the next operator's job easier.
Contact
Email hello@rayder.systems with a short description of the system and the problem in front of you.