Staff Full Stack Engineer

About the role

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.

This role sits on the Ecosystem Health team and owns the end-to-end stack behind Grindr's moderation — the tools used by human moderators, automated photo moderation, fraud and spam prevention, and regulatory compliance . As a Staff engineer, you'll set the technical direction for how we architect, ship, and scale these systems, working across the front-end and back-end with equal fluency. You'll partner directly with Product, Design, Marketing, and Backend Platform to make decisions that show up in production within weeks, not quarters. The systems you build are trusted by millions of users to protect their privacy and serve them reliably at scale.

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 Chicago and will require you to be in person Tuesdays and Thursdays.

About the Job:

- Set the technical direction for Grindr's moderation systems — architect, build, and deliver applications and services that span the full stack and work seamlessly across devices

- Be the point person for the React tools that enable our human moderators and its associated backend

- Build security, privacy, and accessibility into everything — millions of users trust Grindr to protect them, and the bar for what ships is yours to hold

- Maintain existing third-party integrations and develop new integrations as we pivot to being AI first

- Raise the engineering bar across the team — mentor engineers, lead code reviews with empathy, and influence how the broader org thinks about web architecture, performance, and reliability

- Lead the integration of AI into how we build and operate the web stack — from developer tooling to product features

Role Requirements:

- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep production experience across both front-end and back-end systems

- Expert-level proficiency building user interfaces with React, including a strong grasp of modern web performance, state management, and accessibility

- Strong back-end experience in at least one modern language (Java, Kotlin, Node.js, Python, or Go) and the judgment to make architectural decisions that scale

- Hands-on experience operating cloud-native systems on AWS or GCP, including the tradeoffs between managed services and self-hosted infrastructure

- Comprehensive understanding of database fundamentals with production experience across both relational and NoSQL systems

- Track record of leading technical work end-to-end at a Staff level — setting direction, driving execution across teams, and shipping outcomes without heavy process