Senior Software Engineer - Matching and Recommendations

About the role

• Own the technical direction for Bumble’s recommendations platform, evolving the systems that service recommendations for millions of members while balancing relevance, marketplace health, reliability, and latency.
• Lead the design of large‑scale distributed systems that power recommendations across multiple teams and domains, keeping online serving, feature delivery, experimentation, and feedback loops simple, resilient, scalable, and elegant.
• Identify and solve the highest‑leverage technical problems across the recommendations stack, clarify ambiguous architectural decisions, and create solutions that accelerate multiple teams.
• Raise the bar for engineering quality through technical leadership by establishing architectural principles, engineering standards, observability practices, and operational excellence.
• Multiply the impact of other engineers by mentoring senior engineers, influencing technical direction across teams, and sharing context on the organization’s most challenging problems.
• Drive long‑term platform evolution, leading initiatives such as service decomposition, recommendation infrastructure, experimentation capabilities, developer tooling, and AI‑assisted engineering.
• Remain deeply technical through hands‑on contribution: write and review high‑quality code, contribute to critical designs, prototypes, and production code, and rapidly prototype new ideas as a trusted expert for core parts of the recommendations platform.

Qualifications

• Typically requires 6+ years of building large‑scale backend or distributed systems, with experience delivering complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams.
• Deep expertise in designing and operating high‑scale distributed systems, with strong experience in modern languages such as Go, Kotlin, Java, or similar, and a track record of building reliable production platforms.
• Strong understanding of recommendation systems, ranking architectures, or other large‑scale decision systems, including retrieval, candidate generation, ranking, feature serving, experimentation, and feedback loops.
• Experience building cloud‑native systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or comparable public cloud infrastructure, with deep knowledge of scalability, resilience, observability, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy and influence architectural direction across multiple engineering teams through expertise, collaboration, and sound technical judgment.
• Proven experience partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business problems into durable technical solutions.
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers, raising engineering standards, and creating leverage by improving systems, tooling, architecture, and the effectiveness of the wider engineering organization.
• Strong AI fluency, using modern AI‑assisted engineering tools to improve productivity while applying thoughtful human judgment, maintaining high engineering standards, and ensuring member trust remains central to every technical decision.
• Nice to have: GIS experience.

About Bumble

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble Date, BFF, and Badoo. The Bumble platform enables people to build healthy and equitable relationships through Kind Connections. Founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date) and friendship (BFF). BFF is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet nearby and create meaningful platonic connections based on shared interests. Badoo, founded in 2006, is a pioneer of web and mobile dating products.