Staff Cloud Engineer

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 solve technical problems at a scale few companies ever experience. The Cloud Engineering team builds and operates the infrastructure platform that powers Grindr globally. We own AWS architecture, Kubernetes platforms, infrastructure automation, developer enablement, and the cloud standards that product engineering teams build on every day.

As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you’ll help shape the technical direction of Grindr’s cloud infrastructure platform. You’ll partner closely with engineering teams across the company to define scalable infrastructure patterns, improve developer experience, and evolve the systems that support millions of users globally. This is a high-ownership role at a pivotal moment. As Grindr accelerates its AI-native roadmap, infrastructure becomes a strategic advantage — enabling rapid experimentation, global scale, and high-availability systems that serve millions of users every day.

At Grindr, we operate in Grindr Mode: moderately hardcore day to day, truly hardcore when it counts. 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 office and requires in-office collaboration Tuesdays and Thursdays.

About the Job:

- Architect, document, and evolve Grindr’s cloud infrastructure platform across AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform — establishing the standards and patterns engineering teams build on

- Design and implement scalable infrastructure solutions that improve developer velocity, platform reliability, and operational efficiency across multiple AWS environments

- Lead capacity planning and performance optimization for high-volume, globally distributed systems running on EKS

- Drive infrastructure automation initiatives across provisioning, deployments, observability, security, and platform operations

- Partner closely with product engineering teams to design infrastructure patterns for new microservices and platform capabilities

- Contribute to cloud architecture decisions, infrastructure best practices, and operational readiness initiatives across the engineering organization

- Mentor engineers on infrastructure design, Kubernetes adoption, and cloud-native development practices

- Evaluate and integrate emerging AI-driven infrastructure tooling and operational workflows into the platform engineering ecosystem

Role Requirements:

- 8+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years focused on cloud infrastructure in production environments

- Deep AWS expertise across services such as EKS, EC2, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, Route53, Kafka/MSK, and VPC networking

- Strong hands-on experience operating Kubernetes platforms in production at scale