Staff ML 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 tackle technical problems at a scale few companies ever see.

At Grindr, we’re at the dawn of an AI-driven evolution, and you’ll be a key player helping to shape it. This is your chance to harness cutting-edge machine learning to redefine how millions of people in the LGBTQ+ community around the world connect —whether it’s an entertaining chat, a casual encounter or long-term relationship. We’re doubling down on ML as the future of Grindr, and in these early days, your work will leave a mark on a one-of-a-kind platform at global scale.

- Early-Stage Impact: It's still early days for ML at Grindr, so you'll be joining a focused team surrounded by high-impact, greenfield work, setting the stage for our long term ML strategy.

- Recommendations That Reshape: Build systems that match millions to their next big moment, adapting to a range of intents with impact you can feel.

- Conversations That Connect: Use LLMs to uncover insights, and help users find their spark with precision and flair.

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 San Francisco or Palo Alto offices (Palo Alto preferred) and will require you to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

About the Job:

- Architect scalable recommendation systems to serve millions, balancing performance and innovation.

- Leverage the latest LLMs to process vast conversation data and enhance user connections.

- Prototype, iterate, and ship production-ready ML solutions that solve real problems for our user.

- Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, data science and product teams to turn bold ideas into tangible results.

- Drive the exploration of emerging AI tools and techniques to keep Grindr’s tech stack ahead of the curve.

Role Requirements:

- 7+ years of experience building ML systems with a focus on 0-to-1 system development and creating new capabilities from scratch. Experience with recommendation systems or similar is a plus.

- Proven ability to deliver at scale, with fluency in Python and popular ML frameworks.

- A scrappy mindset—you tackle messy challenges head-on and get real results.

- Experience using  data and deployment technologies (Snowflake, Airflow, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Spark, PySpark)

- Experience building machine/deep learning models with at least one common framework such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, or Keras.

- Experience with any public cloud environment - AWS, GCP or Databricks.