Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

About the Team:

Grindr is an AI-native platform powering how millions of gay people connect globally. With 15M+ monthly users, 130B+ annual messages, and a team of fewer than 200, we move fast, stay lean, and tackle technical problems at a scale few companies ever see.

Our team is growing because our user base is growing (30% in the last year!) which means we need you! We’re looking for an experienced Backend Engineer who is passionate about building, testing, deploying, and working closely with the Product team to deliver new features. You will have the opportunity to solve challenging problems, work with the latest systems, collaborate with a kind and capable team, and contribute meaningfully.

At Grindr, we operate in Grindr Mode. Moderately hardcore day to day, truly hardcore when it counts. It’s about doing great work without burning out. Outcomes over outputs. Smart, driven people who raise your bar, with room to live full lives.

This is a hybrid role based in our Palo Alto office office and will require you to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

About the Job:

- You’ll join a backend team of 10+ engineers working on key features that support millions of active users daily.

- Leading projects and other engineers to implement new features and coordinate closely with the product and design teams

- Own the design and development of Grindr’s backend services in a stable and scalable microservices architecture

- Work with Product Managers, Designers, and other Engineers to refine feature design and functionality

- Optimize key pieces of Grindr's platform using tools like Redis, Postgres, and Kafka on AWS services

- Innovate by guiding data-driven decisions to adopt new technologies, architectures, and workflow

- Maintain high availability of the Grindr platform by leveraging distributed systems and infrastructure engineering, while playing a key role in optimizations, cost reduction, and incident management.

- Help guide and mentor team members through pairing sessions, code reviews, and architecture reviews.

Role Requirements:

- 7+ years of experience as a Software Engineer and contributing to Backend Systems (Service APIs, Data Processing, Messaging Services)

- Experience designing and implementing large-scale systems for high load and data consistency in a microservice-based architecture

- Experience designing systems that make heavy and efficient use of Cloud Service, AWS preferred.

- Passionate about testing software and systems

- Deep understanding of concurrency concepts and trade-offs

- You love figuring things out and understanding how they work end-to-end

- Experience with the JVM and at least one JVM language such as Java, Kotlin, and Scala. Experience designing and product ionizing large-scale distributed systems

You May Thrive in this Role if You: