Ryan Torvik

I’m a software engineer who fell into the world of cybersecurity and embedded systems - and stayed there for over two decades.

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of software, hardware, and security. From military communications systems to vulnerability research, I’ve seen what happens when code meets the real world. Sometimes it’s elegant. Often it’s messy. Always it’s interesting.

From Defense Contractor to Founder

I spent nearly 20 years in the defense and aerospace industry - first at Harris Corporation (now L3Harris) as a software engineer, then at Raytheon Intelligence & Space where I progressed from cyber engineer to engineering manager and principal engineer.

In 2020, I founded Tulip Tree Technology, where we’re building CodeForge - an edge-case discovery tool for embedded systems. The premise is simple: developers spend about 50% of their time debugging, and bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production. We’re using AI and advanced analysis to find those bugs before they ship.

AI in Development Tools

The rise of LLMs has been… interesting. I’ve been experimenting with everything from VS Code extensions to getting AI to write STM32 code. Results are mixed, but the potential is real.

What fascinates me is using AI not just to generate code, but to discover edge cases, explore state spaces, and find bugs that traditional testing misses. That’s the core of what we’re doing at CodeForge - combining hardware-in-the-loop testing with AI-powered exploration.

I’m not here to hype AI. I’m here to figure out what actually works when rubber meets road - or when firmware meets hardware.

Expertise

  • Vulnerability Research & DevOps: Two decades of finding what breaks (and fixing it)
  • Embedded Systems: Cross-compilation, hardware mocking, firmware testing
  • Engineering Management: Led teams at Raytheon for 4+ years
  • AI-Assisted Development: Building tools that make developers more effective

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